Free verse is poetry without a regular meter or rhyme scheme. It can still rhyme now and then or fall into a beat for a line; what it lacks is a fixed pattern. It follows the rhythms of speech, and the poet decides where each line ends, so the line break does the work that the beat and the rhyme do in traditional verse. Each of the 15 examples below, nine published poems and six written for this page, comes with a note on what its line breaks do; “Chicago” and “Prufrock” are excerpts.
| Section | Poems | Numbers |
|---|---|---|
| SectionBefore 1900 | PoemsWalt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer” (1865); Stephen Crane, “In the Desert” (1895) | Numbers1–2 |
| SectionThe Imagists | PoemsH.D., “Oread” (1914); William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) | Numbers3–4 |
| SectionSandburg and Masters | PoemsCarl Sandburg, “Chicago” (1914, excerpt) and “Fog” (1916); Edgar Lee Masters, “Lucinda Matlock” (1915) | Numbers5–7 |
| SectionEliot and Hughes | PoemsT. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915, two passages); Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) | Numbers8–9 |
| SectionNew poems | PoemsShort lines, long lines, repetition, enjambment, a speaking voice and sound | Numbers10–15 |
What makes a poem free verse
“Free” means free of a fixed pattern, not free of choices. The Academy of American Poets defines free verse as “poetry not dictated by an established form or meter and often influenced by the rhythms of speech.” In practice a free verse poem gets its shape from four things: where each line breaks, how long the lines are, what repeats, and how the words sound.
| Kind of verse | Meter | Rhyme | Where lines end | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of verseMetrical rhymed verse | MeterRegular | RhymeA set scheme | Where lines endWhere the meter and rhyme say | ExampleA Shakespearean sonnet |
| Kind of verseBlank verse | MeterRegular, usually iambic pentameter | RhymeNone | Where lines endAfter a set number of beats | ExampleMilton's Paradise Lost |
| Kind of verseFree verse | MeterNone fixed | RhymeOptional and irregular | Where lines endWherever the poet chooses | ExampleEvery poem on this page |
| Kind of verseProse poem | MeterNone | RhymeOptional | Where lines endAt the margin, like prose | ExampleBaudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose (1869) |
The name is a translation of the French vers libre, a movement that began in France in the 1880s. English had unmetered verse before the term arrived: the Academy of American Poets calls the King James translations of the Psalms and the Song of Songs its greatest antecedent, and Walt Whitman's first Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855. The Imagists, a group that formed in England in 1912, made free verse a cause, and since the early twentieth century most published lyric poetry has been free verse. If you want to know exactly what it leaves behind, the guide to meter in poetry covers feet, line lengths and scansion.
Before 1900: Whitman and Crane
Whitman wrote long lines held together by repetition and parallel grammar, which is one of the two main roads free verse took. Stephen Crane, forty years after the first Leaves of Grass, wrote the other kind: short, bare lines with the punctuation doing the timing.
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.
The first four lines all begin with “When,” and each is longer than the one before, piling up proofs, figures, columns, charts and applause the way the lecture piles them on the listener. Then the sentence turns on “How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,” and the lines thin out as the speaker slips outside. Read the last line aloud and it falls into the da-DUM rhythm of iambic pentameter: the one regular line in the poem arrives with the silence.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
Crane called the poems in his first book of verse “lines,” and printed them untitled, numbered with Roman numerals. This one tells a parable in ten lines with no rhyme and no meter. Watch where the breaks fall: “And ate of it” gets a line to itself, and the creature's answer is split so that “And because it is my heart” comes last, the line the whole poem has been walking toward.
Imagist free verse: H.D. and Williams
The Imagists wanted a poem built from one exact image, with no word that didn't help present it. Ezra Pound's two-line “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) is the best-known Imagist poem: faces in a crowd set beside petals on a bough, with nothing to join them, a technique called juxtaposition. The guide to writing a haiku reads it closely. The preface to their anthology Some Imagist Poets (1915) set out what they believed about rhythm:
To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty.
Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
An oread is a mountain nymph in Greek myth, and she speaks to the sea as if it were a forest: pointed pines, great pines, green, pools of fir. The poem never says the waves look like trees. It fuses the two pictures, sea and forest, and hands the reader both at once. Each line is one command, so the poem comes in surges, like surf.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Sixteen words, one sentence, in four stanzas of three words and then one. Each break makes you wait. “upon” gets a line to itself, so the thing that so much depends on is held back for a whole line. Then “a red wheel” ends a line, and for a moment that is all there is, a wheel, until “barrow” arrives; “rain” waits the same way for “water.” Splitting the two compound words lets the reader see each part on its own. The opening is the only statement in the poem, and it never says what depends on a wheelbarrow. Williams leaves that gap for the reader, and a century of readers have filled it.
Sandburg and Masters: speaking voices
Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters both wrote about Illinois in the 1910s, and both wrote free verse that sounds like people talking: Sandburg like a man arguing on a street corner, Masters like the dead of a small town telling their own stories.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
…
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
The poem opens with five lines of names for the city, and then the lines grow long enough to argue. Each “they tell me” line states a charge and concedes it, so the defense of Chicago comes from someone who has seen the worst. Later the poem stacks single words, one to a line and set in from the margin, and the reader's eye drops down the page as fast as the work gets done.
I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed—
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you—
It takes life to love Life.
Nearly every poem in Spoon River Anthology is an epitaph spoken by one of the dead of a fictional small town. Masters serialized them in the St. Louis journal Reedy's Mirror in 1914 and 1915 before the book came out. Lucinda's voice is the music here: plain statements, a list of chores and pleasures, then a turn on the living. The last line pivots on two senses of one word, and the capital letter tells you which is which.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
The opposite of “Chicago”: lines of three or four words in two short stanzas. The short lines slow the reading to the fog's pace, and the white space between the stanzas is the moment it settles. Same poet, same book, and the line length changes with the subject. That is what “the poet decides where each line ends” means in practice.
Rhythm without meter: Eliot and Hughes
Free verse can be as musical as anything in rhyme. These two poems get their music from different places: Eliot from rhymes that come and go, Hughes from a refrain and a few words repeated until they sound like a chant.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
…
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
“Prufrock” is usually taught as free verse, and it follows no fixed meter, but it rhymes: I and sky, streets and retreats, hotels and oyster-shells, “What is it?” and visit, and in the second passage all and fall, afternoons and spoons, room and presume. The rhymes arrive at irregular intervals and the lines swing from short to long, so the music sounds overheard rather than planned. Free verse can rhyme, as long as no scheme decides where.
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Hughes wrote it while crossing the Mississippi on his way to visit his father in Mexico. The refrain, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” stands alone as its own stanza, twice. Between, four lines that begin with “I” travel through history river by river, from the Euphrates to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi line runs longest of all. The “I” is one speaker and a whole people at once, and the repetition gives the poem the structure a meter would give a hymn.
After the 1920s, free verse became the ordinary way to write a poem in English. Two later landmarks, still in copyright and so named rather than quoted: William Carlos Williams's “This Is Just to Say” (1934), written as if it were a note left on the kitchen table, and Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” (1956), whose long lines Ginsberg thought of as single breaths, in the catalog tradition of Whitman.
Six new free verse poems
Each poem below was written for this page and leans on one technique from the classics above, so you can see it working on its own.
one dryer
still turning
a red sock
climbs to the glass
and falls back
into the warm dark
with everything else
Seven short lines, no capitals and no punctuation, so nothing interrupts the turning. Each break gives one movement its own line, climbing and then falling, and the last line widens from a single sock to the whole load, and to whoever sits watching it at eleven at night.
The fish man hoses down his ice and the ice runs pink into the drain,
The dumpling woman counts her coins in stacks of ten along the steel of the counter,
The boy who sells phone cases sleeps sitting up, his chin on his own display,
The motor coughs, the bulbs on the string go out one stall at a time from the river end,
And the cats come in from the parking lot as if someone had rung for them.
Five lines, each a complete scene, the first four beginning “The” and the last “And.” A catalog like this makes a crowd out of individuals, as Whitman's and Sandburg's do. Lines this long need strong verbs to keep moving (hoses, counts, sleeps, coughs), and the switch to “And” tells the ear the list is ending.
It knows the third stair from the top, and who steps over it.
It knows which tap runs hot first.
It knows the weight of a suitcase in the hall in August,
and the weight of the same suitcase in September.
It knows who sleeps with the door open.
It does not know where you went.
Every sentence starts “It knows” until the last, which breaks the pattern to say what the house can't know. Repetition at the start of lines, called anaphora, gives free verse the frame that meter gives a sonnet, and the place where the pattern breaks is where the poem turns. The two suitcase lines carry the whole plot.
My father tells me to bring
nothing. I bring
oranges anyway. He holds one
the whole visit, like a stone
warmed in his hand, and at the door
he says take care of
yourself, and I stand there holding
the first half of the sentence.
Three breaks change the meaning as you cross them. “Tells me to bring” sounds like a request until “nothing” arrives. “I bring” becomes a small act of defiance. “Take care of” hangs open long enough for the reader to supply “me” before “yourself” closes it, and that gap is what the speaker is left holding.
Twenty-six years on the corner of Elm and Fifth.
I have stopped a fire truck with one glove.
I could tell the Mendes twins apart before their teachers could.
Now their kids cross here, and look both ways
because I told their parents to.
The city is sending a plaque. I'd rather
they fixed the light.
Tomorrow someone younger stands here in my vest,
and the cars will stop for her the way they stopped for me,
and not one driver will know the difference.
No image scheme and no repetition, only a voice, the way “Lucinda Matlock” works. Short declarative lines carry the facts and the jokes. The longer lines at the end carry the feeling the speaker would never name: being replaced, and nobody noticing.
The lake takes the last of the light
and gives back only the sound of it,
slap and lull under the dock,
a loon somewhere, low and alone,
and our two heads, dark on dark,
talking softly so the water won't hear.
Free verse still has music. Listen for the l sounds (lake, last, light, only, lull, loon, low, alone) and the long o in only, low and alone. There's no rhyme scheme and no meter, but the repeated sounds hold the six lines together the way rhyme would. The guide to literary devices in poetry names each of these sound devices, from alliteration to assonance.
How to write free verse
- Start with a sentence you'd say out loud
Free verse is built on speech, so draft in plain sentences, the way you'd tell it to a friend. Words that only appear in old poems (O, thee, wondrous) sound stiff in a free verse line. If you need a subject, the list of poem ideas has 150, each with an angle to start from.
- Decide what a line is in this poem
Pick a unit and mostly keep to it: a breath (Whitman's long lines), a phrase or a clause (Masters), or a single image (H.D., Williams). Mixing units works when it's a choice, as when Sandburg drops from long lines to single stacked words.
- Put weight at the end of the line
The last word of a line gets a small pause and extra attention. End on nouns and verbs, or break where the next line will change the meaning, as “Visiting Hours” does with “take care of.”
- Give the poem a frame
Without meter, something else has to hold the poem together: a repeated opening, a refrain, a list, a pattern of line lengths, a turn near the end. Choose one before you revise, and the other choices get easier.
- Use stanza breaks as pauses
A blank line is a longer silence than a line break. Start a new stanza when the time, place or thought shifts, or when you want the reader to wait, as “Fog” waits before “It sits looking.”
- Read it aloud and move the breaks
Read slowly and mark where you actually pause. Where your breath and the line break disagree, change one of them, then read it again the next day. The guide to writing a poem takes the whole process from first image to revised draft.
Free verse mistakes, fixed
Most weak free verse has one of four problems. Each row shows the mistake and one way out of it.
| Mistake | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| MistakeProse chopped into lines | BeforeI walked to the station / this morning and the / train was late again so / I waited on the platform | AfterThe 7:40, late again. / I wait on the platform / with the pigeons, all of us / pretending we're going somewhere. |
| MistakeLines ending on weak words | BeforeThe light on the / water was so bright that / I had to look away from / it | AfterLight on the water, / so bright / I had to look away. |
| MistakeOld-fashioned “poetic” words | BeforeO wondrous eve, thy stars / do shine upon my weary soul | AfterMore stars over the parking lot / than I've seen since June. |
| MistakeNaming the feeling | BeforeI feel so lonely now / that you are gone | AfterI still buy the big carton of milk / and pour most of it away. |
The fixes have something in common. Each one gives the line a concrete thing to stand on (a train time, a parking lot, a carton of milk) and ends on a word that earns its pause. The last row is the poetry version of show, don't tell: nobody says lonely, and the milk says it for them.
On a longer draft, ask the Strokes Assistant to list every line that ends on “the,” “of,” “and” or “a,” then decide which of those breaks you meant.
Frequently asked questions
Is free verse the same as blank verse?
No. Blank verse has no rhyme but keeps a regular meter, almost always iambic pentameter, as in Milton's Paradise Lost and much of Shakespeare. Free verse has neither a set meter nor a rhyme scheme. If you can tap a steady five-beat pulse through an unrhymed poem, it's blank verse. If the pulse changes from line to line, it's free verse.
Can a free verse poem rhyme?
Yes, now and then. What free verse avoids is a rhyme scheme, a pattern the poem has to follow. T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rhymes often but irregularly, and many free verse poems use slant rhyme, assonance or a closing echo to tie a stanza together without committing to a scheme.
How long is a free verse poem?
As long as it needs to be. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is sixteen words, and “Howl” runs for pages. Because no form sets the length, the usual test is to cut: if removing a line costs the poem nothing, it goes, and if one stanza only repeats another, keep the stronger of the two.
