1. VERS LIBRE, (French: “free verse”), 19th-century poetic innovation that liberated French poetry from its traditional prosodic rules. In vers libre, the basic metrical unit is the phrase rather than a line of a fixed number of syllables, as was traditional in French versification since the Middle Ages. In vers libre, the lengths of lines may vary according to the sense of the poem, the complete sentence replaces the stanza as a unit of meaning, and rhyme is optional.
Vers libre appears to have been the independent invention of several different French poets in the late 1880s. Among its early advocates and theoreticians were Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, Francis Viele-Griffin, and Edouard Dujardin. The use of a free prosodic structure in French poetry was not entirely new: it had antecedents in the poems of the Symbolists, the prose poems of Rimbaud, and, much earlier, in the metrical experiments of Victor Hugo. But the widespread adoption of vers libre at the end of the 19th century influenced poetic trends in other countries, so that verse patterned on irregular metrical designs has become a tradition in the modern poetry of all Western nations. See also free verse.
2. FREE VERSE, poetry organized to the cadences of speech and image patterns rather than according to a regular metrical scheme. It is “free” only in a relative sense. It does not have the steady, abstract rhythm of traditional poetry; its rhythms are based on patterned elements such as sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, rather than on the traditional prosodic units of metrical feet per line. Free verse, therefore, eliminates much of the artificiality and some of the aesthetic distance of poetic expression and substitutes a flexible formal organization suited to the modern idiom and more casual tonality of the language.
Although the term is loosely applied to the poetry of Walt Whitman and even earlier experiments with irregular metres, it was originally a literal translation of vers libre, the name of a movement that originated in France in the 1880s. Free verse became current in English poetics in the early 20th century. The first English-language poets to be influenced by vers libre, notably T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, were students of French poetry. The Imagist movement, started in England in 1912 by Aldington, Pound, Flint, and Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”), was concerned with more than versification, but one of its principles was “to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” Almost from the beginning, the free-verse movement split into two groups, one led by Amy Lowell and a more formal one led by Pound. Eliot’s early experimentations with free verse influenced the loosening of formal metrical structures in English-language poetry. Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens all wrote some variety of free verse; the versification of Williams and Moore most closely resembles that of the vers libre poets of France.