Poetry Today Online

What Do You Need To Know About Free Verse?

Opening Your Mind To New Possibilities

Free Verse borrows freely from all other kinds of poetry. It has changed in specific ways over time, but can best be understood if you also learn the rules and devices used in other forms. A writer may start out and reinvent his own principles, or learn from the things tried by poets throughout the history of poetry. Rules of poetry and rules of grammar are a starting place for young school children. There are no regularly accepted rules for free verse as it is always evolving. It has wisely been said that rules come after writing techniques are invented but rules themselves do not guarantee great writing.

Study Blank Verse To Resist Rhyme

Even as beginners, serious adult poetry learners should resist the limitations imposed by their teachers from childhood. If you have previously preferred various kinds of rhymed verse, study the form called blank verse. Search it out online for some tips. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Its value as a learning tool is that it introduces a rhymester to the less predictable endings in which you must seek end words that do not rhyme with the previous line endings. This broadens your vocabulary usage and introduces unexpected words to end lines rather than the more predictable end words often found in rhymed verse.

Dig Deep To Support The Theme, Not The Rhyme

It helps break the habit of choosing phrases that support a rhymed ending. The phrases then become primary in the writing and not subordinated to end rhyme. If this sounds obscure to you, try studying blank verse and see how it frees up your poems. A blank verse poem can be any number of lines. Try for about eight to start. Blank verse poems are often very long. It really helps to study the form in a class where you can have instruction to guide your attempts. Look for blank verse examples such as Hamlet's Soliloquy by Shakespeare and Michael by Wordsworth.

Blank Verse Is A Natural Step Toward Freedom

After you introduce such devices as alliteration and repetition in your blank verse, you will find that many other devices fit in, and you will begin to use them in free verse also. Blank verse has regular meter, whereas free verse has irregular meter as well as irregular rhyme or no rhyme. In free verse as well as any other form there are goals to seek and pitfalls to avoid. This is not the same as rules, however. With free verse there are a lot of guidelines but no rules. If you study free verse in a class or read about it in textbooks you will learn that it opens up great possibilities and introduces numerous conventions that have been used by different poets. It has not yet been definitively explored and probably will not be.