By Bacopa Literary Review 2025 Poetry Co-Editor Grayson May
What is free verse? Certainly, free verse does not mean "without structure or meaning." Nor is free verse glorified prose. It is not a lesser, easier or even lazier form of poetry. Rather, it is the daring to build a poem differently, with great passion, boldness, intention, and—of course—freedom.
There is freedom in formlessness. There is form in formlessness. Free verse means that the poet is an entrepreneur, empowered with the ability to stake their own claim in rhythm, meter, rhyme, and original or avant garde form. It is a rejection of the formal or the regular. Free verse is anarchical. T. S. Eliot says: "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." This is less indictment of free verse than it is of the misinterpretation of what free verse really is. The true free verse poet breaks from traditional formatting, pushing the limits of what free verse and free form can do: and be.
For free verse poems are living things. They are things to be held and handled. They speak like creatures, not like poems. Robert Frost once wrote to Carl Sandburg that writing free verse is like "playing tennis without a net." Sandburg famously replied: "There have been poets who [played] more than one game of tennis with unseen racquets, volleying airy and fantastic balls over an insubstantial net, on a frail moonlight fabric of a court." The free verse poet must be courageous in bringing such fantastical things to life.
And in order to create such life, the free verse poet must have deep knowledge, insight and understanding of what poetry is and has been. Free verse poets must have deep comprehension of what past poets and present poets have done in order to determine what makes a future poet. This insight may translate as allusion to traditional poetic verse. It also might translate as an intentional breaking of and from the poetic canon. Picasso said that in early years he mastered the skill and comprehension of traditional drawing and painting; yet, it took a lifetime for him to learn to make art from a place of limitless, childlike freedom. So must a free verse poet first understand how to be a formal, traditional poet before they can fully, tenderly, and rapturously embrace their free-verse-ness.
Finally, free verse poems must actualize their very name by creating shockwaves that reverberate in the reader. We've spoken of the boldness, the courage, the distinction and the comprehension demonstrated by the free verse poet. Now we must address the impact that a free verse poet makes in the reader and/or listener. It is a physical reverberation, one that may render gasps, tears, ecstatic shakes and/or earthquakes. Because free verse is synonymous with tremendous innovation, uniqueness, originality, eccentricity and authenticity, its impact is one that stuns or profoundly moves any who encounter it. Both figurative and literal movement! Free verse is a rapture, a reckoning, a revelation, an event, an apocalypse, a disruption.
For those free verse poets or free-verse-poets-to-be searching for inspiration, look to Whitman, Ginsberg, Angelo, Hirschfield, Hughes, H.D., Eliot, Rich, as well as earlier examples, like Gustave Kahn, Rimbaud and Mallarme who originated the vers libre movement in late 19th century France, or the London-based Poet's Club, or even Goethe and Milton who played with free verse long before it had a name. Today, free verse has become an over-diluted, waterlogged term, because it is the norm. It has lost its spark. It has become an excuse not to rhyme. Even so, there are still free verse poets out there today making living creatures that will punch the breath out of you. Give yourself the freedom to be one of them. To be new. To eschew. It's never too late to make something terrifically, terrifyingly you.
About the editor: Poetry Co-Editor Grayson May is a poet, playwright, writer, artist and actor. Their work has been published in Colorado Review, Cleveland Book Review, Ponder Review and Z Publishing House, among others. Their lyric play Scripture was recently featured in the Actors Studio Drama School's Repertory Season in NYC. They have a MFA in Playwriting from Pace University and a BFA in Creative Writing, with poetry concentration, from the University of the Arts.
