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History and Definition of Free Verse

In order to clearly assess the value of free verse, a clear definition of free verse

needs to be attained. “Free verse is the avoidance of preestablished rhyme, stanza,

pattern, or meter (Jacobus 613). “It certainly may be the case that no verse is free if it

uses a common language, because every human language is an overweening system of

regulation and bondage that no speaker can escape without landing in unintelligibility”(Harmon 225).

In addition to having a clear definition of free verse, sometimes it is necessary for

people to have a brief understanding of the history of free verse poetry in order to have a

clearer understanding of it. “Survey’s innovation of black verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)

in the mid-sixteenth century offered a measure of freedom in one dimension. By the eighteenth century,

a few far-seeing poets could manage without rhyme, meter, or regular rhythm, and Christopher Smart

and William Blake could write a verse qualifying for the term free. Several poets of the

nineteenth century continued the tradition’s among them Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman were foremost.

In much of the newer free verse, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the old shackles

of rhyme were thrown off, but, in some cases, new chains (such as Whitman’s reliance on

Parallelism and Anaphora) quickly took their place. Even today, very little of published

verse is truly free in every respect”(Harmon 225)