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Brenan Holston
Mrs. Taylor
AP Language Arts
26 January 2017

On Free Verse
Of course, everyone knows what Free Verse is. Its just

like regular poetryexcept without rhyme or meter or structure.

Can it really be considered poetry? Free Verse as a form of

poetry has been debated since its rise in popularity. T.S. Eliot,

one of the 20th centurys major poets, said that No verse is

free for the man who wants to do a good job. Critics of the art

form assert that Free Verse is not poetry due to it not adhering

to the definition of poetry. Free Verse is totally devoid of

meter. I, on the other hand, believe that Free Verse is poetry.

The first definition of poetry in the Dictionary is, the art of

rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure

by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts. This definitely

encompasses Free Versebut only on a basic level.

Real Free Verse takes skill, and one must craft a poem of

this type so that it does not become beautiful prose. Esteemed

poets such as William Carlos Williams and Yvor Winters have had

trouble trying to craft a masterpiece of this type. Although Free

Verse is a challenging field to navigate, I have compiled three

pieces of advice to help poets in their journeys to success.

The first step in creating beautiful free verse is the most

obvious: avoid prose. Prose is normal human speech, and while

Free Verse is modeled after the way we talk, a poet shouldnt

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allow their work(s) to regress into dialect. Poet Adele Kenny

refers to this impulse to write common speech as the Prose-O-

saurus. This is a big problem that we younger poets face, and in

order to get to the next level, we must overcome.

The second step may seem a bit contradictory at first:

create structure. One of the main draws and drawbacks that Free

verse has is that it is modeled after human jargon. Every human

has a speech pattern. That pattern, if written, may show some

sort of structure. Now you have to remember, Free Verse cant

rely on structure or meter. An aspiring Free Verse poet as to

find a balance between structure and the absence of structure.

Good examples of this balancing act include selections 5 and 7 in

Song of Myself. Toward the end of both of the poems (which are

Free Verse), Whitman uses a similar pattern, or in this case, a

similar structure. He uses the words for and and respectively

in order to create a platform to put emphasis on his

points/ideas. Emphasis is extremely important in poetry as a

whole, especially when it is being delivered. This brings me to

my next point.
The third, and last step is probably the most challenging

and rewarding: develop a sense of sound. This is another tip from

Adele Kenny, but the most pertinent to Free Verse. Even though

this type of poetry doesnt need a meter, and barely needs

structure, a rhythm must be created for a delivery. Whether the

artist wants to have the poem sound nuanced and goofy or somber
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and straight-forward, there must be a rhythm evident in the

structure of the poem that indicates that. This may mean

separating two lines to put emphasis on the latter or even

erasing a line in order to change how one would deliver the poem

as a whole.
While these arent the only thoughts to factor into a Free

Verse poem, they must be accounted for in order to succeed in

creating true art, and not just a pretty journal entry. Poetry,

while an art form, is hard to perfect. This goes double for Free

Verse. So to you aspiring poets out there, dont give up on Free

Verse. I assure you, it is real poetry and it only takes a little

bit of dactylic grace, structure and rhythm to make it true art.