Free Verse Poetry Station

1. Free Verse Poetry Station St. Robert Catholic High School 10 Academic

2. Origin of Free Verse Poetry • Free verse, term loosely used for rhymed or unrhymed verse made free of conventional and traditional limitations and restrictions in regard to metrical structure. • Rythm, especially that of common speech, is often substituted for regular metrical pattern. • Free verse is a literal translation of the French vers libre, which originated in late 19th-century France among poets, who sought to free poetry from metrical regularity. • The term has also been applied by modern literary critics to the King James translation of the Bible, particularly the the Psalms. • The form is also closely associated with English and American poets of the 20th cent. who sought greater liberty in verse structure. • Verse without formal meter or rhyme patterns. Free verse, instead, relies upon the natural rhythms of everyday speech. • The American poet Walt Whitman was a pioneer of free verse • However, it was fellow Americans T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound who are generally regarded as the major instigators of free verse in English. • Free verse is particularly associated with both the imagist and modernist movements.

3. Characteristics of Free Verse Poetry not written using strict meter or rhyme recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns that readers will perceive to be part of a coherent whole Freedom applies not only to freedom from traditional metre, but freedom to use visual and sound effects as desired for surprise, thickening of meaning, symmetry, repetition, or simply for fun lines can be shortened for speed lines can be segmented into clots of words or syllables to slow down the reading or comprehension

4. I Dream'd in a Dreamby Walt Whitman I DREAM'D in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the    whole of the rest of the earth,  I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,  Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led    the rest,  It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,  And in all their looks and words. • Read the following poem to understand the meaning • Then read the poem to analyze the structure.