Free verse came about at the end of the 19th century, sparking controversy amid many readers and poets alike. In looking for new ways to represent their own reality, modernist poets sought to forgo inherited rhyme schemes to represent the sounds of human diction more closely. Ezra Pound, among the most influential poets of early modernist works, wrote in his essay A Retrospect that, “I think one should write [free verse] only when one ‘must,’ that is to say, only when the ‘thing’ builds up a rhythm more beautiful than that set of meters, or more real...” (Pound, Ezra. Pavannes and Divisions. New York: Knopf. 1918.).

Free verse refers to poetry that has abandoned the designated form and meter that traditionally govern the number and frequency of syllables, rhymes, line breaks, and even the overall shape of a poem. Although free verse omits the preordained patterns of classical meters, sound patterns do emerge. At root, all human dialogue is a mix of stressed and unstressed syllables. By canting the lines of the poem for more unstressed syllables, the rhythm is a slow ebb and flow with long periods of muted syllables and sudden interjections of louder stressed ones.