What is Free Verse Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Surabhi Balachander, Oregon State University Assistant Professor of U.S. Literatures
December 10, 2024
In the world of poetry, “free verse” is usually defined more by what it’s not than what it is. Here are just a few of the things it isn’t:
Blank verse
Ghazal
Limerick
Sestina
Sonnet
Villanelle
On a basic level, free verse refers to poetry that doesn’t follow a clearly delineated form with a fixed, regular rhyme or metrical scheme. A sonnet is a great example of something that is in no way free verse—it traditionally follows a fixed rhyme scheme (which can differ depending on the type of sonnet) and a fixed metrical scheme. The rhythms and sounds of a traditional sonnet fall into an expected, consistent pattern.
Free verse breaks the rules, or, more accurately, writes its own. While most of the fixed forms I mentioned have their roots before 1900, free verse really exploded in the twentieth century (though it did exist earlier), and most published poems in the twenty-first century can be classified as free verse. As a result of free verse’s popularity, I have way too many examples to choose from, but here’s one free verse poem I love, an untitled poem by Lucille Clifton:
surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
and the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar
poems about nature and landscape
surely but whenever i begin
“the trees wave their knotted branches
and …” why
is there under that poem always
another poem?
There’s a lot going on formally here. For example, Clifton uses no capitalization and little punctuation. She also creates half-meanings via enjambment. The poem has a consistent line length until the third-to-last line, a change that signifies a turn in the poem’s meaning. But none of these formal characteristics have to do with regular rhyme or meter. In a poem that criticizes traditional thematic aspects of poetry—“beautiful” or “familiar” nature poems without social engagement—using free verse, and not a traditional form, strikes me as very appropriate.
Robert Frost famously disparaged writing free verse as too easy, comparing it to “playing tennis with the net down.” I don’t agree with him! There’s a sense in which free verse is liberating—I always think back to the moment in the Arthur episode “Rhyme for Your Life” in which a cartoon animal version of William Carlos Williams declares that he is a political prisoner for refusing to rhyme, shouting “Free verse! Free verse!”—but on the other hand, writing in free verse comes with a lot of responsibility. There are a million choices that go into a free verse poem, and each one carries a lot of weight.
A poem not having a fixed rhyme and metrical scheme doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use meter or rhyme at all—and it definitely doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a form. Consider Ruth Ellen Kocher’s “We May No Longer Consider the End,” which has some thematic similarities with the Clifton poem:
The time of birds died sometime between
When Robert Kennedy, Jr. disappeared and the Berlin
Wall came down. Hope was pro forma then.
We’d begun to talk about shelf-life. Parents
Thought they’d gotten somewhere. I can’t tell you
What to make of this now without also saying that when
I was 19 and read in a poem that the pure products of America go crazy
I felt betrayed. My father told me not to whistle because I
Was a girl. He gave me my first knife and said to keep it in my right
Hand and to keep my right hand in my right pocket when I walked at night.
He showed me the proper kind of fist and the sweet spot on the jaw
To leverage my shorter height and upper-cut someone down.
There were probably birds on the long walk home but I don’t
Remember them because pastoral is not meant for someone
With a fist in each pocket waiting for a reason.
This poem doesn’t follow a fixed or traditional form. There’s an odd number of lines, and they’re different lengths, both visually on the page and by syllables. There’s no regular rhyme scheme. At the same time, there’s rhyme in the poem—“right / night” end-rhyme; they also echo “I” in the previous line, and there’s a sort of slant rhyme between “down” and “don’t.” And some of the lines do follow metrical patterns, though again, not regularly or consistently. Lines 4 and 5 are composed of trochees, feet consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, so they do have a consistent rhythmic feel—but the lines aren’t the same length as each other, and the pattern of feet breaks down shortly after. Free verse, as in Kocher’s poem, can encompass a fluid use of rhyme and meter.
There are also poetic forms that aren’t bound to any particular rhyme or metrical scheme, and thus can be written either in fixed forms or free verse. In The Making of a Poem: The Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Eavan Boland and Mark Strand refer to these, like the pastoral (poems about rural life and/or nature—a form Kocher’s poem explicitly references) or the elegy (poems of mourning) as “shaping forms,” in contrast to traditional “verse forms.” They also call free verse “open forms,” which I find to be a generative term—they are indeed forms “open” to the poet. Some contemporary poets even invent their own free verse forms. For example, Marwa Helal, an Egyptian American poet, invented the “Arabic,” the rules of which she explains in her 2019 collection Invasive Species:
The Arabic is a form that includes an Arabic letter with an Arabic footnote, and an Arabic numeral, preferably written right to left as the Arabic language is, and vehemently rejects you if you try to read it left to right. To vehemently reject, in this case, means to transfer the feeling of every time the poet has heard an English as Only Language speaker patronizingly utter in some variation the following phrase: “Oh, [so-and-so] is English as a Second Language …” As if it were a kind of weakness, nah.” (114)
I think this form is particularly exciting in that it draws on a non-English language for English poetry (and for the record, English was also my second language!). You can see Helal read one of her “Arabic” poems here. Other poets, such as Safia Elhillo and Zaina Alsous, have published their own takes on Helal’s form.
Finally, sometimes it’s debatable whether something is free verse! What about prose poems? They don’t follow fixed schemes, but they also aren’t written in lines with line breaks—are they verse? What about Jericho Brown’s form, the duplex? This form doesn’t exactly rely on rhyme, but instead repeats entire lines regularly throughout a poem with minimal variation. Is it free verse? What do you think?
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Balachander, Surabhi. "What is Free Verse?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 10 Dec. 2024. Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-free-verse-definition-and-examples. Accessed [insert date].