Free Verse

According to Britannica, free verse is “poetry organized the cadences of speech and image patterns rather than according to a regular metrical scheme”. It is therefore still organized just doesn’t follow the traditional steady rhythm patterns, its rhythm is based on patterned elements (sounds, words, phrases, sentences or even whole paragraphs).

This allows the poetry piece sound less artificial and more natural, to be formal yet flexible to read and write and suited well to the modern casual tone of literature.

Example of free verse:

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

BY WALT WHITMAN

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/art/free-verse

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer

Kateřina Brettová