Is free verse really free?

Free verse is free of one thing: a prescribed, regular metre or rhyme. It is an open form of poetry that tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech, and in the 21st century most published poems are considered free verse. But poets and critics have long argued that dropping a fixed metre is not the same as having no form.

Free verse is as subject to elements of form as any other poetry: the poetic line, rhythm, strophes, stanza patterns and cadences. T. S. Eliot wrote that no verse is free for someone who wants to do a good job. Robert Frost, commenting on Carl Sandburg, compared writing free verse to playing tennis with the net down. Even Ezra Pound, by giving free verse a musical structure, made it, in Herbert Read's paradoxical phrase, no longer free. And in 1916 the critic John Livingston Lowes asked how you tell the difference between very beautiful prose written as free verse and free verse written as prose.

Its roots run deep. Free verse is generally considered an early 20th-century innovation of the late 19th-century French vers libre, but the sort of cadencing now recognised in it can be traced at least as far back as the Hebrew psalmist poetry of the Bible. Walt Whitman based the long lines of Leaves of Grass on the phrasing of the King James Bible, and he repeated certain phrases and used commas to create rhythm and structure.

The label can even flip. According to the writer Jan Morris, when Welsh poets speak of free verse, they mean forms like the sonnet or the ode, which obey the same rules as English poetry.