free verse
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
- free-versifier noun
Etymology
Origin of free verse
First recorded in 1905–10
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Renshi is a kind of Japanese collaborative poetry that is more open-ended free verse than older forms like “renku.”
From Seattle Times • Oct. 8, 2022
Its 12 poems were written in free verse, meaning they didn’t rhyme.
From Washington Post • Apr. 30, 2022
This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981.
From New York Times • Apr. 15, 2022
The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume.
From New York Times • Apr. 15, 2022
Feeling for the first time that I could speak to listening ears, I wrote a wild, crude poem in free verse, coining images of black hands playing, working, holding bayonets, stiffening finally in death ...
From "Black Boy" by Richard Wright
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
