Definition of free verse - What it is, Meaning and Concept

Verse is a term with several uses.It can be the set of words that maintain a cadence and that are subject to a certain measure.It is important to emphasize that the poems have the first unit ordered to verses. Free , meanwhile, is that which enjoys freedom (which is not subordinate or bound).

A free verse , therefore, is a kind of expression of poetry that departs from the usual criteria of measurement and rhyme.While it is possible to affirm that it is a similar way to poetic prose and the prose poems , the free verse has the particularity of maintaining the traditional typographical location of the verses, that is, of bleeding lines, so that at the level visual is not possible to relate to the rest.

The free verse is characterized by its irregularity and its variable extension .This mode of expression emerged in the middle of the 19th century in opposition to the tenth , the sonnet and the rest of the predominant forms in the field of poetry.Although the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy does not recognize it, it is possible to use the term versolibrismo , a neologism, to refer to the use of this form of expression when creating poetry.

Those who write in free verse do not pay attention to the stanzas , although they can segment their verses into similar units.It is important to note that, although the rhymes , the metric and the accentuation is not fixed, the poet continues to take care of the musicality.

Beyond its broad historical development, free verse reached its peak in surrealism , creationism , ultraism and other trends avant-garde.Their authors opted for the repetition of syntactic elements and for the use of different rhetorical figures, such as the metaphor .

It is important to highlight that some of the bases from which the free verse tried to move away, such as the mentioned rhyme and metric, had predominated in this form of expression until the last decades of the 19th century.In other words, the mission of tearing down these walls to present to the world a new way of doing poetry, and understanding it, was not precisely simple.

A clear predecessor of the free verse is the silva , which emerged in the 17th century, which can be defined as a metric series that is constructed from verses of eleven or seven syllables , and with free consonant rhyme, although some verses may not have rhyme.The silva gave the baroque poets a great freedom when composing, since it allowed them, although implicitly, to avoid structuring in stanzas .

Continuing its features from a structural point of view , we can say that the form of the free verse is less rigid, since it seeks to reflect the naturalness of oral expression, trace the writer's inhalation and exhalation rhythm through the outline of his verses.

It is common to find the name of Walt Whitman in this context, since he was the first of the world-renowned poets who experimented with the free verse.In his particular case, he leaned towards the so-called verse , inspired by the semantic parallelism of the Psalms and Prophets of the Bible.

In addition to Walt Whitman, we can name many and many great artists of the word who at the time dedicated their efforts to this form of expression, and this group found Emily Dickinson , Charles Baudelaire , Anne Sexton , Ruben Dario and Jules Laforgue .On the other hand, it is important to point out most of the current poetry it relies on the free verse, since we are at a time when the message is valued more than the structure.