Precursors
As the name vers libre suggests, this technique of using more irregular cadences is often said to be derived from the practices of 19th-century French poets such as Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue in his Derniers vers of 1890. However, in English the sort of cadencing that we now recognize as a variety of free verse can be traced back at least as far as the King James Bible. By referring to Psalms it is possible to argue that free verse in English first appeared in the 1380s in the John Wycliffe translation of the Psalms and was repeated in different form in most biblical translations ever since. Walt Whitman, who based his long lines in "Leaves of Grass" on the phrasing of the King James Bible, influenced later American free verse practitioners, notably Allen Ginsberg.One form of free verse was employed by Christopher Smart in a long poem called Jubilate Agno, written sometime between 1759 and 1763 but not published until 1939.
Many poets of the Victorian era experimented with free verse. Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and T. E. Brown all wrote examples of rhymed but unmetered verse. Matthew Arnold's poem Philomela contains some rhyme but is metrically free. Poems such as W. E. Henley's 'Discharged' (from his In Hospital sequence), and Robert Louis Stevenson's poems 'The Light-Keeper' and 'The Cruel Mistress' can be counted early examples of free verse.Free verse in English was persuasively advocated by critic T. E. Hulme in his A Lecture on Modern Poetry (1908). Later in the preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916, he comments, 'Only the name is new, you will find something much like Vers libre in Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis; a great deal of Milton's Samson Agonites..and the oldest in Chaucer's House of Fame.'
In France, a few pieces in Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem collection Illuminations were arranged in manuscript in lines, rather than prose and in the Netherlands, tachtiger (i.e. member of 1880s generation of innovative poets) Frederik van Eeden employed the form at least once (in his poem "Waterlelie" ).
Goethe (particularly in some early poems, such as "Prometheus") and Hölderlin used free verse occasionally, due in part to a misinterpretation of the meter used in Pindar's poetry; in Hölderlin's case, he also continued to write unmetered poems after discovering this error.The German poet Heinrich Heine made an important contribution to the development of free verse with 22 poems, written in two-poem cycles called 'Die Nordsee' (The North Sea) (written 1825-1826). These were first published in Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) in 1827.
Read more about this topic: Free Verse