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Literature vocabulary · Poetry

Free verse

Meaning in literature, with examples

nounCommon term

In literature, free verse means: Poetry that does not follow a regular meter or rhyme scheme, relying instead on natural speech rhythms, line breaks and imagery.

In Turkish: serbest şiir, serbest nazım, serbest ölçü

How it is used

The most common form of modern poetry. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) is an early landmark in English; in Turkish, Nazım Hikmet and the Garip poets (Orhan Veli, Oktay Rifat, Melih Cevdet Anday) made it central. Poems are written in free verse.

Example sentences

  1. Most of the poems in the collection are in free verse, with very short lines.

  2. Free verse is not prose: line breaks still matter a great deal.

Common collocations

  • written in free verse
  • free verse poem
  • modern free verse
  • verseWriting arranged in lines with a rhythm, as opposed to prose; also a single line of a poem or a group of lines in a song.
  • meterA regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry, measured in units called feet, such as the iamb (da-DUM) or the trochee (DUM-da).
  • rhymeThe repetition of the same or similar sounds at the ends of words, especially at the ends of lines in a poem, as in 'night' and 'light'.
  • poetryLiterary writing arranged in lines that uses rhythm, sound, imagery and often rhyme to express feelings and ideas in a concentrated way.
  • ModernismAn early twentieth-century movement that broke with traditional forms and experimented with new ways of writing, such as fragmentation, multiple viewpoints and stream of consciousness.

More terms: Poetry

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