There is a clear description of the “free verse” form in the “Poet’s Glossary on the American Academy of Poets website. According to this site free verse is: “a poetry of organic rhythms, of deliberate irregularity, improvisatory delight. Free verse is a form of nonmetrical writing that takes pleasure in a various and emergent verbal music. . . . .Free verse is often inspired by the cadence—the natural rhythm, the inner tune—of spoken language. It possesses visual form and uses the graphic line to differentiate itself from prose.
While free verse may have fewer set ‘rules’, T.S.Eliot writes that “no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.”
The beautiful spoken word and free verse texts by Willie Perdomo, Jose Olivarez, and Staceyann Chin skillfully employ free verse in addition to repetition to heighten cadence and put a shock into the language.
Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman, one of the first American poets to use free verse form, was considered radical for doing so in the late 1900s.
