Free verse: no rhyme scheme is not no rules
Free verse
A free verse poem is a poem written without a fixed metre and without a rhyme scheme, which leaves the line itself, and the decision about where it breaks, doing the work that counting and rhyming do elsewhere.
It is a type of poem rather than a technique used inside one, and it is not a rhyme scheme, because it is the absence of one. Free verse is the default in almost everything a young writer will hear at a microphone, and it is the form most often mistaken for having no rules at all.
What free verse is free of, and what it is not free of
Free verse is free of two things only: a fixed metre, meaning a repeating pattern of stresses counted the same way in every line, and a set rhyme scheme, meaning an agreed pattern of sounds at the ends of lines. Everything else a poem owes, it still owes. The line still has to break somewhere, and the break is now carrying more weight rather than less, since nothing else is marking the edges. The rhythm still has to be a rhythm, taken from the way people actually speak rather than from a metre. The order of the material still has to be an order, the images still have to be chosen, and the ending still has to land.
That is why the phrase no rules is misleading in a workshop. Dropping metre and rhyme removes two supports and hands their job to three others: the line break, the image and the shape of the sentence. A first free verse draft usually fails not because it broke a rule but because nothing took over from the ones it dropped.
Does a free verse poem have to rhyme
No, a free verse poem does not have to rhyme, and most do not. Rhyme is still allowed, and it turns up often in work written for performance, where it arrives in the middle of lines as much as at the ends and is decided line by line rather than set out in advance. What makes a poem free verse is not the absence of every rhyme; it is the absence of a scheme the reader could predict and the poet is committed to.
Sound has to be doing something, all the same. A free verse poem that has given up rhyme and put nothing in its place reads as prose that has been cut up. The replacements available are repetition of words, repetition of grammar, assonance, alliteration, pace, and the image itself, which is why Metaphor carries more weight in free verse than it does in any counted form. What most often replaces rhyme in a poem said out loud is repetition at the head of the line, the same words beginning line after line, which is Anaphora.
Free verse against blank verse, a prose poem and a structured poem
Free verse is confused with three neighbours, and the differences are easy to hold once they are set side by side. Blank verse is the one most often mistaken for it, because it does not rhyme either.
| Form | Metre | Rhyme | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free verse | None fixed | None fixed | Broken where the poet chooses |
| Blank verse | Iambic pentameter, five stresses and about 10 syllables | None | Broken by the count |
| Prose poem | None fixed | None fixed | No line breaks at all |
| Structured poem | Often fixed | Usually a set scheme | Counted in advance |
So blank verse drops the rhyme and keeps the count, which is why most of Shakespeare's plays and the whole of Milton's Paradise Lost move at a steady, speakable measure. A prose poem drops the line break as well and runs to the right-hand margin, which means it gives up the one tool free verse keeps; that is the real difference between free verse and prose poetry, and it is audible, because a prose poem is carried by its sentences and a free verse poem by its lines. A structured poem fixes its shape before the first word, such as a sonnet at 14 lines or a villanelle at 19 with two returning refrains. Most Spoken word poetry is free verse, or free verse with rhyme used as a device rather than as a scheme.
Where free verse came from
Free verse came into English by two routes, a name and a practice, and knowing them settles the argument about whether it is a modern shortcut. The name translates the French vers libre, taken up by poets there in the late nineteenth century. The practice in English is usually dated from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1855, whose long unmetred lines are commonly traced to the parallel repetitions of the psalms in English translation rather than to any metre. T. S. Eliot, in a 1917 essay on vers libre, made the point that has been repeated ever since: the freedom is only freedom from a particular set of constraints, and no verse is free for anyone doing the job properly.
How to write a free verse poem that holds together
To write a free verse poem that holds together, put the work into the line rather than into the search for a rhyme.
- Draft the whole thing in sentences first, with no line breaks, so the material exists before the shape does.
- Read it aloud and mark where you breathe, because those marks are the first honest guess at the lines.
- Break the lines at those marks, then move a few of them one word earlier or later and read it again.
- Cut every abstract noun that is doing nothing, and put a physical thing in its place.
- Find the pattern the poem has made by accident, in a repeated word or a repeated shape, and make it deliberate.
- Write the last line so that it closes something, since free verse gives no signal that the poem is over.
How a free verse poem fails
A free verse poem fails in four recognisable ways, and all four are fixable in a second draft. It reads as chopped prose, because the breaks fall wherever the page ran out. It stops rather than ends, because nothing was built to close. It piles up abstractions, because with no metre to fill, the writer reaches for the biggest available words. Or it repeats without developing, so a pattern that was interesting three times becomes furniture by the eighth. The other moves available for fixing all four are set out on The devices a young writer actually reaches for.