What is Free Verse?

What is Vorticism?

What is Romanticism?

What is the Chronotope?

What is Bakhtin's Carnivalesque?

What was the Fin de Siècle?

What is New Historicism?

What is Modernity?

What is Dadaism? Understanding the Dada Art Movement

What is Cubism?

What is Futurism?

What is Modernist Literature?

What is New Criticism?

What is the Bloomsbury Group?

What is Imagism? | Definition, Analysis & Examples

Imagism was a literary movement instigated by a small group of American and British writers in the early twentieth-century, where it coalesced and clashed with many other ‘isms’—Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism—that are all woven into the much larger tangled tapestry of modernism. Starting around 1910, Imagism rejected Romanticism and late Victorian poetry as excessive and sentimental. Imagism emerged as a sharp, ascetic, and precise poetic technique. In Modernism (2016), Peter Childs discusses how Imagism embraced a “hard classicism,” and also how it invariably drew on, borrowed, and appropriated ancient Greek poetry and techniques from China and Japan. As Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers write in Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, Imagism signalled the moment that “[h]ard angles, jagged and unexpected juxtapositions, and the collision of past and present would govern free verse,” (2015) where the shape and form of anglophone poetic experimentation was fundamentally altered. Imagism argued for the use of clear, precise, and exact language in poetry. This contrasted Romantic poetry, like work by John Keats or Lord Byron, and instead—as the 1915 Imagist anthology sets out in its preface—Imagist poets “believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry” (Lowell, Some Imagist Poets, 1915).

Imagism is thus a crucial thread within the broader story of modernity and modernist studies. T. S. Eliot retrospectively referred to Imagism as “the starting-point of modern poetry” (cited in Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry, 2007). The movement carries, as Will Montgomery notes in Short Form American Poetry, a “foundational status in the modernist line of anglophone poetry” (2020), where its influence can be seen throughout avant-garde experiments of the twentieth century. Indeed, the rejection of formal meter (like iambic pentameter) and a turn towards a more organic and ‘free’ style of verse (what the French symbolist poets called vers libre) that Imagism championed can be seen as one of the principal features of modernist poetics. Although Imagism as a movement lasted only until 1917, its legacy—or “fulfilment”, as Mick Imlah suggests (The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, 2014)—can be seen in later works by H.D., Eliot, and Pound. Indeed, Imagism’s precision and Hellenistic motifs can be seen in the larger structure Trilogy (1944), and in the mythic threading of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and The Cantos (1925), demonstrating Imagism’s influence.

Despite its lingering legacy, Peter Nicholls reminds us that Imagism was more of a moment than a movement (Modernisms, 2017), taking shape in 1912 after the American poet Ezra Pound gave it its name. However, much about Imagism’s ‘moment’ is contested. It was galvanised by a grouping that—as Montgomery writes—was “as confected and irregular as any in the long history of the twentieth-century avant-gardes” (2020). Helen Carr observes that even the fact of Pound giving Imagism its name

is one of the few elements in the contentious and hotly disputed story of the imagist movement on which there is general agreement. Where it came from, whose ideas it represented, what indeed imagism meant, who was or was not an imagist were all fiercely debated questions for most of the movement’s existence, as they have been in literary history since (The Verse Revolutionaries, 2009).

Pre-Imagism: The Poet’s Club and the School of Images

Imagism first began as a loose grouping between T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound. In 1908, Hulme was involved in setting up the Poets’ Club in London, where he was interested in the influence of the French Symbolists and vers libre, which rejected traditional meter patterns, rhyme, and structure. Hulme produced several booklets for the club, the first of which was For Christmas in January 1909, which included his poems “Autumn” and “A City Sunset”, which—although the word was not in use at this point—Peter Jones positions as the first prototypical Imagist poems (Imagist Poetry, 2001). These poems abandon formal ideas of metre, rhythm, rhyme and present stark images of sunsets and autumnal evenings where a “ruddy moon” is presented as “a red-faced farmer” and stars peek out of the sky “[w]ith white faces like town children” (“Autumn”, 1909). Flint, too, was an advocate for vers libre, and met with Hulme, to discuss the future of modern poetry and how it could be invigorated by the forms like the Japanese tanka and haiku, and the work of the French Symbolists (Imlah, 2013). Moving from America, Pound arrived in London where he met Hulme and Flint in April 1909 (Jones, 2001). Together they formed the ‘School of Images’. 

The idea of the image is crucial here. As Childs writes, the image “summed up the Imagists’ preference for concision and compression” (2016). Pound defined the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, 1913). Expanding on how Imagists conceived of the image or visual metaphor within poetry, Beasley writes, 

Theorists of Modernist Poetry

The major point to emphasize is that, according to these poets, language cannot be understood as a transparent window through which one sees reality; it is a medium that is more likely to obscure reality. Their poetry will attempt to get behind language, as it were, by highlighting the mismatch between what we feel and what we can say. (2007)

Pound saw the image as a way to do exactly this. Through the conversations that propelled the Poet’s Club and its splintered iteration, the School of Images; Pound, Hulme and Flint imagined a sort of poetry which acted as the image itself, which paved the way for Imagism. 

Stories of Imagism locate its “birth” in a London teashop, where Pound famously read some poems by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington in the early Fall of 1912 (Nadel, Ezra Pound, 2004). He used the term—“Imagiste”, with its French spelling—to describe them and their work. 

The American writer H.D. had arrived in London in 1911, where Pound introduced her to his circle of writers and friends. She had met Pound in 1901 in America, becoming close and, at one point, were engaged to be wed. In London, she met the British poet Aldington (who she would later marry), where the two shared a fascination with Hellenistic poetry (McCabe, H. D. & Bryher, 2021). 1911 was also the year that Pound was appointed the foreign representative of the little magazine Poetry, which was launched by Harriet Monroe in Chicago, and he was on the hunt for material to send back to her. Pound, H.D., and Aldington met regularly to discuss poetry. At one of these meetings, Pound called them Imagist poets. H.D. remembers how, when Pound read and edited one of her poems “Hermes of the Ways,” he extolled, “this is poetry” and promptly “scrawled ‘H.D. Imagiste’ at the bottom the page” (H.D., End to Torment, 1958). Aldington remembers the story a little differently: instead of the tea room at the British Museum, he remembers it taking place in the Fuller tea-shop in Kensington, where Pound told them they were both Imagistes (Carr, 2009). According to Pound, the term came to him alone one night to describe H.D.’s poetic technique, where he wrote to Flint, recalling “when on a certain evening in, I think in 1912, I coined the word Imagisme, I certainly intended it to mean something which was the poetry of H.D.” (quoted in Firchow, “Ezra Pound’s Imagism and the Tradition”, 1981).

Although it is unclear where exactly the meeting took place, what is certain is that Pound sent six poems to Monroe to publish in Poetry after this meeting. These were: H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways”, “Priapus” and “Epigram”, and Aldington’s “Choricos”, “To a Greek Marble” and “Au Vieux Jardin”. Writing to Monroe, Pound proclaimed, 

This is the sort of American stuff that I can show here and in Paris without its being ridiculed. Objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek! (cited in Paige, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1950)

 Monroe published Aldington’s poems in November 1912, and H.D.’s work in January 1913, both with biographical notes declaring them “Imagistes”, and part of 

a school is that of the Imagistes. One of their watchwords is Precision, and they are in opposition to the numerous and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and interminable effusions… (quoted in Jones, 2001)

Imagism forged itself in opposition to Romanticism’s verbose introspection, and poets like John Keats, Percy Shelley or Lord Bryon. Instead, H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways”, distils epic Greek myths into a precise, sharp, short and crystalline structure. The first stanza demonstrates the economy of language that Imagism celebrated: 

	The hard sand breaks,
	And the grains of it
	Are clear as wine. (H.D., 1913)

H.D. layers image upon image, where metaphor constructs meaning without explanation. Pound extolled this ‘super-position’ of images, which can be seen in his “In the Station of a Metro” (1913), where he combines the images of “faces in the crowd” and “petals on a wet, black bough” to describe Paris Metro’s Concorde Station.

Although Imagism’s origin is often bound up with the famous moment in a London tearoom, Montgomery reminds us that the movement was as “confected and irregular as any in the long history of the twentieth-century avant-gardes” (2020). The first recorded use of the word “Imagisme” was actually in Pound’s appendix, “The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme”, which was tucked away at the end of one of his poetry collections, which he would have been working on in late April 1912. It included the note: “As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendents of the forgotten school of 1909 [the School of Images], have that in their keeping” (Pound, Canzoni & Ripostes, 1913, [2012]). 

The Imagist anthologies, Pound’s departure, and Amy Lowell’s entry 

Following the flickers of “Imagisme” across appendixes and introductory notes, two brief articles emerged in Poetry’s March 1913 issue which clarified the movement’s core tenets. These were “Imagisme” (1913), which bore Flint’s byline, and “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (1913), by Pound, although many have noted that they were both penned by Pound (Cuddy-Keane, Modernism, 2014), or at least jointly composed (Sherry, “Imagism”, 2010). 

“Imagisme” set out some crucial rules: 

Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective. 

To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 

As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. 

Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” was actually drafted as a rejection slip for Poetry’s editors, which Vincent Sherry explains may have encouraged “a misunderstanding of the principles of Imagism as an editorial cleansing action” (Sherry, 2010). It propounded instructions such as “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something”, and “Go in fear of abstractions” (Pound, 1913).

In March 1914, the first Imagist anthology was published. Edited by Pound, Des Imagistes included poems by Pound himself, H.D., Aldington, Flint, Skipwith Cannell, John Cournos, Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), James Joyce, Amy Lowell, Allen Upward, and William Carlos Williams. Among these were the original six poems by H.D. and Aldington that had been published in Poetry. However, there was already a slippage forming around the term “Imagism”, where not all the poems that were included in the anthology adhered to the strict Imagist doctrine that Pound proffered (Imlah, 2014). 

Next, Pound penned an article, “Vorticism”, for the Fortnightly Review in September 1914, which discussed further aspects of Imagism, delineating it from symbolism’s “mushy technique” (1914). This article also signalled Pound’s predilection with Vorticism, which Jones describes as a “stricter form” of Imagism (2001), and would eventually contribute to Pound’s departure from Imagism. Founded by Wyndym Lewis, Vorticism was an art movement interested in sculpture, painting, hard abstraction and geometric angles; while Imagism was invested in poetic verse. Vorticism distilled Imagism’s concept of the image into the “VORTEX”, which Pound described as “every kind of whirlwind of force and emotion” (Paige, 1950). As Pound turned to Vorticism, Imagism’s original set began to splinter. Further fracture lines soon appeared: Flint published a short “The History of Imagism” in The Egoist in May 1915, which centered the Eiffel Tower Poets and Edward Storer’s poetry, which Pound vehemently disputed, writing to Flint that Imagism was coined to capture H.D.’s poetic technique and “most emphatically NOT the poetry of friend [Edward] Storer” (quoted in Firchow, 1981).

In July 1914, the Bostonian socialite and writer Amy Lowell arrived in London, eager to promote her work and Imagism more broadly. She organised a dinner to belatedly celebrate the publication of Des Imagistes, which had included her poem “In a Garden”. The dinner took place in London on 17 July 1914, where Lowell was joined by Pound, Lowell, H.D., Aldington, Flint, Upward, and Ford. It was—in Ira Nadel’s words—“a disaster” (2004). Sherry calls it “The Last Supper of Imagists”: a “parabolic fable” of literary history, where Lowell and Pound argued about the identity of the Imagist initiative (2010). 

Carr sees the divisive dinner as the marker of “the second major stage in the history of imagism” (2009). While Pound shifted his interests to Vorticism and Lewis’s magazine Blast!, Lowell edited the second Imagist anthology, Some Imagist Poets (1915). This collection included many familiar Imagist names from the first anthology, with work from H.D., Aldington, Lowell, and Flint, but its approach was decidedly different: its formation was democratic. As Lowell sets out in the preface: 

Some Imagist Poets

Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form. A sort of informal committee—consisting of more than half the authors here represented—have arranged the book and decided what should be printed and what omitted, but, as a general rule, the poets have been allowed absolute freedom in this direction, limitations of space only being imposed upon them. (1915)

This announcement was accompanied by some further definitions of Imagist poetry, including intentions such as: “To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite” (1915). The collection also saw poems by John Gould Fletcher and D. H. Lawrence included, with a notable omission of any poems from Pound, who refused to contribute. 

Two more anthologies followed Some Imagist Poets—in 1916 and 1917—all organised by Lowell and the Imagist collective. Pound lamented her approach, insisting that her “Amy-gism” had diluted the original term, where he demanded that she remove the word “Imagist” from the title (Carr, 2009). H.D., Susan McCabe writes, tried to bridge the divide diplomatically, writing to Lowell to suggest alternative names to appease Pound, putting forward the Pre-Raphaelite inspired title “THE SIX” (McCabe, 2021), which Lowell and her publishers dismissed in favour of the original “Imagist Poets”. 

The role of little magazines and journals played a crucial role. As well as publishing articles and essays like “Imagisme”, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, “Vorticism” and “The History of Imagism”, magazines like Poetry, The New Freewoman (which was renamed The Egoist), The Glebe, The Little Review, and The New Age all disseminated Imagist writing and poetry. Indeed, Beasley calls The Egoist the “major organ of Imagism in Britain (as Poetry was in the United States)” (2014). As Childs (2016) details, The Egoist’s trajectory was fundamental to Imagism: it was launched by Harriet Shaw Weaver and Dora Marsden in June 1913 as The Freewoman, where they entrusted Pound with soliciting literary contributions. He selected work by H.D., Aldington, Lewis, Robert Frost, Williams, and Lowell, among others. From 1914, it was refashioned into The Egoist, with Aldington joining the editorial board, which welcomed H.D. in 1916. 

The anthologies halted in 1917, with the impact of the First World War, and movement dispersed, having “felt to have served its purpose” (Imlah, 2013). Aldington was fighting on the front; H.D. met her partner Bryher and turned to cinema and prose, although she continued writing poetry; Lowell wrote poetry, published novels, and passed away in 1925; and Pound departed to Vorticism, The Cantos and, later, to fascism. 

In 1930, a nostalgic Imagist anthology was produced. Aldington edited the fifth and final Imagist collection, Imagist Anthology 1930 alongside H.D. and Ford, which included work from all the original contributors from the anthologies except the deceased Lowell; Cannell, who they could not locate; and Pound, who declined. 

From the discussion in 1930 arising from Aldington’s reflection on Imagism, to contemporary discussions about “The New Modernist Studies” (Mao and Walkowitz, 2008), Imagism’s legacy has been a topic of great critical interest and conjecture. Hugh Kenner published The Pound Era in 1975, which enshrined Pound—and, by proxy, Imagism—as central to anglophone modernism, and contributed to the formation of a narrow modernist canon built around “the men of 1914”—Pound, Joyce, Eliot and Lewis—while other modernists were lost, as they fell out of print and were forgotten. 

Susan Stanford Friedman wrote in 1975, “Who Buried H.D.?”, where feminist scholars worked to recover H.D.’s work since the 1980s, which included her contribution to Imagism, in a lively critical discussion that is still ongoing today. Similarly, there has been a renewed interest in Lowell’s role in Imagism, where Paul Bradley Bellew has called for the reevaluation of the idea of her as the “woman who stole control of the quintessential school of modern poetry from the movement’s famed founder” but, rather, someone who was asking crucial questions about “who had the authority to edit modernism, the scale of its audience” and “whether it should be a narrow, elite audience or a broad popular audience” (“At the Mercy of Editorial Selection”: Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and the Imagist Anthologies”, 2017).

Imagism existed as a critical nexus of poetic theory, where various poets came together around Pound’s term. It holds an influential place within the history of modernist cultures: it tells us a great deal about the ways in which avant-garde movements form, flourish, and fracture; and also about the ways that the stories of modernism are told. 

Further Imagism reading & resources on Perlego 

Barnsley, S. (2013) Mary Barnard, American Imagist. State University of New York Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2674390/mary-barnard-american-imagist-pdf 

Bradshaw, M. (2016) Amy Lowell, Diva Poet. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1632147/amy-lowell-diva-poet-pdf 

Debo, A. (2012) The American H.D. University of Iowa Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2962166/the-american-hd-pdf 

Dowthwaite, J. (2019) Ezra Pound and 20th-Century Theories of Language. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1379329/ezra-pound-and-20thcentury-theories-of-language-faith-with-the-word-pdf 

Duncan, R. (2011) The H.D. Book. University of California Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/552500/the-hd-book-pdf 

Whitworth, M. (2010) Reading Modernist Poetry. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2774078/reading-modernist-poetry-pdf 

Xie, Ming. (2015) Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1644228/ezra-pound-and-the-appropriation-of-chinese-poetry-cathay-translation-and-imagism-pdf

Arrowsmith, R. (2011) “The Transcultural Roots of Modernism: Imagist Poetry, Japanese Visual Culture, and the Western Museum System”, Modernism/modernity. 

Coats, J. (2009) "Part of the War Waste": Pound, Imagism, and Rhetorical Excess”, Twentieth Century Literature. 55(1), pp. 80-113.

Rainey, L. (1994) “The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound”, Modernism/modernity. 1(3), pp. 195-220.

Ramsey, W. (1967) “Uses of the Visible: American Imagism, French Symbolism”, Comparative Literature Studies. 4(1/2), pp. pp. 177-191.

Thacker, A. (2011) The Imagist Poets. Liverpool University Press. 

Beasley, R. (2007) Theorists of Modernist Poetry. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1608856/theorists-of-modernist-poetry-ts-eliot-te-hulme-ezra-pound-pdf

Beasley, R. (2014) “Ezra Pound”, in A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Ed. by Chinitz, D. and McDonald, G. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/998785/a-companion-to-modernist-poetry-pdf 

Bellew, P. B. (2017) “‘At the Mercy of Editorial Selection’: Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and the Imagist Anthologies”, Journal of Modern Literature. 40(2)

Carr, H. (2009) The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists. Jonathan Cape.

Childs, P. (2016) Modernism. 3rd edn. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1561261/modernism-pdf 

Cuddy-Keane, M., Hammond, A. and Peat, A. (2014) Modernism: Keywords. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1002512/modernism-keywords-pdf 

Eliot, T. S., “American Literature and the American Language”, quoted in Jones, P. (2001) Imagist Poetry, ed. by Peter Jones. Penguin. 

Eliot, T. S. (1998 [1925]) The Waste Land. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1713774/the-waste-land-pdf 

Diepeveen, L. (2014) “The Visual Arts”, in A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Ed. by   Chinitz, D. and McDonald, G. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/998785/a-companion-to-modernist-poetry-pdf 

Firchow, P. E. (1981). “Ezra Pound’s Imagism and the Tradition”, Comparative Literature Studies, 18(3), pp. 379-385. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40246277 

Flint, F. S. (1913) “Imagisme”, in Poetry. 1.6. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20569729 	

Flint, F. S. (1915). “The History of Imagism”, in The Egoist.Friedman, S. (1975) “Who Buried H.D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in ‘The Literary Tradition’”, College English. 36(7).

H.D. (1913) “Hermes of the Ways”, Poetry, 1(4). Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=12626 

H.D. (1944) Trilogy. New Directions. Available at: 

Hulme, T. E. [1909] “A City Sunset”. All Poetry. Available at: https://allpoetry.com/poem/11903445-A-City-Sunset-by-Thomas-Ernest-Hulme 

Hulme, T. E. [1909] “Autumn”. Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44431/autumn-56d22384ccb48 

Imlah, M. (2014) “Imagism” in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, ed. by Hamilton, I. and Noel-Tod, J., 2nd edn. Oxford University Press. 

Jones, P. (2001) Imagist Poetry. Penguin. 

Kenner, H. (1973) The Pound Era. University of California Press.

Latham, S. and Rogers, G. (2015) Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/395130/modernism-evolution-of-an-idea-pdf 

Lowell, A. (1915) Some Imagist Poets. Houghton Mifflin. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1825880/some-imagist-poets-an-anthology-pdf 

Lowell, A. (1916) Some Imagist Poets. Houghton Mifflin. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1825888/some-imagist-poets-1916-an-annual-anthology-pdf 

Mao, D. and Walkowitz, R. (2009) “The New Modernist Studies”, PMLA. 123(3). Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501895 

McCabe, S. (2021) H.D. and Bryher: An Untold Story of Modernism. Oxford University Press. 

Montgomery, W. (2020) Short Form American Poetry: The Modernist Tradition. Edinburgh University Press. 

Nadel, I. (2004) Ezra Pound: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3501712/ezra-pound-a-literary-life-pdf  

Nicholls, P. (2017) Modernisms. 2nd edn. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2996811/modernisms-a-literary-guide-second-edition-pdf 

Paige, D. D. (1950) The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941. Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Pound, E. (1913) “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, Poetry. 1(6). Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20569730 

Pound. E. (1913) “In a Station of the Metro”, Poetry, 2(1). Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro 

Pound, E. (1914) “Vorticism”, Fortnightly Review. no. 96. Available at: https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/ 

Pound, E. (eds) (1914) Des Imagistes. Albert and Charles Boni. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1726946/des-imagistes-an-anthology-pdf 

Pound, E. (2012) Canzoni & Ripostes. Elkin Mathews. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1845966/canzoni-ripostes-whereto-are-appended-the-complete-poetical-works-of-te-hulme-pdf 

Pound, E. (2015) Posthumous Cantos. Carcanet. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1692779/posthumous-cantos-pdf 

What is Imagism?

What is the Harlem Renaissance?

Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

What is Weird Fiction?

Surrealism in Literature & Film: An Introduction

What is Speculative Fiction?

What is Magical Realism?

What is Deconstruction?

What is Free Verse Poetry? | Key Examples, Definition & History

Free verse, in a basic sense, can be defined as a form of poetry that is “free” from the need to subscribe to a particular rhyme scheme and/or meter. Free verse is often regarded as a kind of democratization of poetry; freeing it from perceived elitism, and making room for more colloquial and authentic expressions of the human experience. As Jeffrey Wainwright summarizes,

Poetry: The Basics

The general movement of ‘free verse’ then is towards a democratic informality that has a more flexible rhythm and a wider, more colloquial, range of words. (2015)

Although there are examples of free verse from much earlier in history, including the Bible and ancient Greek and Roman poets, as a definable poetic movement free verse is generally considered to have arisen in the 19th and 20th centuries. Free verse has now become the most popular form of poetry, and a huge number of diverse poems can technically be identified with this umbrella term. 

Although free verse does not follow a set scheme of rhyme and meter, this does not mean that it is the same as prose: free verse still employs many poetic techniques, even if it does so in a less uniform manner. Free verse’s continued use of “the poetic line” is often highlighted as a key point which distinguishes it from prose — it still “looks” like a poem on the page, with carefully selected line breaks which differentiate it from the solid blocks which usually characterize prose (the precise difference between the two is still a matter of debate, however). As a brief example of this, we can look at the famous free verse of Walt Whitman (1819–1892). The lines here are varied in length, and move according to their own irregular rhythm and meter: 

Leaves of Grass

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

(“Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, 1891–92, [2006])

We will see more of Whitman in the following guide, and dig deeper into the topic of free verse — exploring its key features, and considering the question: is free verse actually “free” at all? 

As we have already touched upon, there are examples of poems which do not follow set rules of rhyme and meter throughout history. Roughly speaking, however, it is only within the last couple of centuries that free verse began to develop into the popular form which continues to flourish to this day. In the following section, we will highlight just a few of free verse’s influential figures and movements. 

William Blake is considered to be one of the earliest major proponents of English free verse. In “To the Public,” Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–1820), Blake makes a memorable argument for the value of free verse and explains why he is departing from blank verse, which had been the dominant form for centuries:

Complete Works of William Blake

I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakespeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and indispensable part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts – the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race! (1804–1820, [2021])

Although blank verse does not rhyme, Blake feels creatively restricted by the iambic pentameter it generally follows. Here, then, Blake argues for a less monotonous form of verse that possesses “variety in every line” and a flexible meter which adapts itself to the subject matter. Just as with later proponents of free verse, Blake also makes a connection between the freedom of poetry and the freedom of humanity itself. 

As Wainwright explains, biblical verse was a key influence on Blake’s free verse, both in form and content — giving him the “amplitude” his imagination demanded, as well as a free “form closer to popular knowledge” (2015):

After all, in the eighteenth century, the Bible was heard and read in churches, chapels and homes daily and weekly and would be far more widely familiar than the couplets of famous London poets of the period such as Alexander Pope. (2015)

Although much of Blake’s poetry is written with a more regular meter, his use of free verse can be notably seen in such works as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93, [2014]) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–1820, [2021]). Blake is renowned for his eccentricity, as well as the visionary nature of his art and poetry. This free spirit is mirrored in the way he broke free of poetic rules in search of his own individualistic modes of expression. 

Walt Whitman is one of the most popular and influential free verse poets in history. In the words of Carl Martin Lindner, “Whitman’s freer verse powerfully influenced the course of Western poetry, and he still remains its most impressive practitioner” (“Freedom,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman, 2013). 

First published in 1855, before being updated and expanded throughout his life, Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass represented a radical departure from prevailing poetic norms. One contemporary review of the first edition, for example, has this to say:

Walt Whitman

The poems, twelve in number, are neither in rhyme nor blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity, and, as many readers will perhaps think, without any idea of sense or reason. The writer’s scorn for the wonted usages of good writing extends to the vocabulary he adopts; words usually banished from polite society are here employed without reserve and with perfect indifference to their effect on the reader’s mind [...]. (Charles Eliot Norton, 1855, in Walt Whitman, 2014)

Whitman’s employment of free verse, colloquial language, and taboo subject matter were all part of his quest for artistic freedom and authenticity. As Whitman writes in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, “The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one” (1855, [2016]). With his free verse, Whitman created a new and artistically liberating sphere in which he could express himself fully — free of the stultifying rules, expectations, and attitudes of what had gone before. Rather than seeking to fit his poems to existing forms, “Each poem had its own form to find, and that form would emerge in the writing of the poem” (Lindner, 2013). Andrew Rowcroft explains that

An Introduction to Poetic Forms

For Whitman, there was simply no way a sonnet could adequately capture the immense scope, diversity, and ambition of America. Free verse, then, was more adequate to this endeavour, as it did not require fitting the world as Whitman saw it into a metrical form. (Rowcroft, “Free Verse,” in An Introduction to Poetic Forms, 2022)

The freedom of the verse itself reflected its subject matter and Whitman’s wider worldview: “Freedom is central to Whitman’s vision of life—the artistic life, the individual life, and the life of the society” (Lindner, 2013). Lindner continues:

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman

Ultimately, Whitman’s vision of individual freedom (including artistic freedom) culminates in his hope for a truly democratic society. In such a culture, people are equal, unique, and free to become themselves. [...] In Whitman’s dream of America, all people are equal (men and women, poor and rich, black and white, professor and mechanic, Christian and non-Christian), all have maximum opportunity for self-development resulting in distinct and fully realized identities (individuation), and all share in the culture’s life. (Lindner, “Freedom,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman, 2013)

Whitman advocated for a free society in which all are equal, and his poetry reflects this approach — through its form, subject matter, and use of colloquial language. Whitman depicted people from all walks of life in his free verse, and he did so in the kind of language they would have used themselves. As Lindner observes, Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” “most fully expresses this vision,” with sections 15 and 33 parading “an extraordinary and representative variety of individuals going about their business in this new country” (2013). Let’s take a look at this extract from section 15, for example:

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,

The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,

(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)

The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,

On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,

The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold [...]. 

(Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, 1891–92, [2006])

In only a few lines here, Whitman includes a roll call of societal figures from the richest to the poorest, and empathizes with a prostitute while inclusively addressing her in person. Whitman goes on to explain that he sees each other person as an extended part of himself: “these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them / [...] And of these one and all I weave the song of myself” (1891–92), [2006]). As Whitman writes in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass,  

Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition

The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy. (1855, [2016])

Through his free verse, Whitman wants to meet his readers on equal, intimate terms, and share with them his unvarnished self:

I [...] will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. [...] What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me. (1855, [2016])

Whitman has found many readers to “look in the mirror” with him in the centuries since then. Although his influence has been felt across the world, he has become particularly iconic in the United States of America. As Charles Brower observes, Leaves of Grass is “Probably the most famous book of American poetry ever written,” and

No poet before him was so wholly American, so committed to celebrating American democracy and identity. For this reason, Whitman can be classed as the first truly great American poet, an artist who sprang off a platform of European poetic models and soared into new territory. And no American poet after Whitman could claim to be entirely free of his influence. Echoes of Whitman appear in the poems of generation after generation of writers—from the bleakest of Modernists in the post–World War I era, to the stars of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, to the hippest of Beat and Confessional poets in the 1950s and 1960s. (Brower, “Introduction,” Leaves of Grass, 1891–92, [2006])

With his free, colloquial verse, Whitman pushed boundaries and left a lasting influence on free verse and literature in general — with many lauding him as the voice of America itself. 

In the late nineteenth century, free verse began to gather even more momentum with the vers libre movement in France (vers libre is literally translated as free verse). As Wainwright notes, vers libre did not develop in a vacuum: “French poetry, most obviously in the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), had been seeking its own departures from formal verse” (2015). Symbolist poets Gustave Kahn (1859–1936) and Jules Laforgue (1860–87) are regarded as key foundational figures, and vers libre quickly grew. In 1891, fellow poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) writes that:

We are now witnessing a spectacle which is truly extraordinary, unique in the history of poetry: every poet is going off by himself with his own flute, and playing the songs he pleases. For the first time since the beginning of poetry, poets have stopped singing bass. Hitherto … if they wished to be accompanied, they had to be content with the great organ of official metre. (Quoted by Wainwright, 2015)

Drawing upon all of the above influences and more, modernist poetry of the early twentieth century developed free verse into an increasingly popular and coherent form. Richard Bradford argues that “It was not until the 20th century that free verse became an established part of the formal repertoire of English poetry” (Poetry: The Ultimate Guide, 2010). T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) are key figures here, along with many others. Referencing the three poets above, Bradford explains that, although it can sometimes be difficult to confidently designate a particular poem as an example of free verse,

Poetry: The Ultimate Guide

with Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ or Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’, we can agree to designate all three as free verse only because they persistently evade the abstract patterns of regular verse. We know what they are because of what they are not. (2010)

Pound, Williams, and other poets of the time such as H.D. (1886–1961), were all members of the imagist movement, which developed in a rich crucible of modernist and avant-garde experimentation in the early twentieth century (cubism, surrealism, dadaism, and futurism are other notable examples). The use of free verse was a central component of the imagist philosophy: to present clear, resonant images in a free and unhindered form. Amy Lowell (1874–1925) is another major imagist poet, and the editor of influential imagist anthologies. In her preface to Some Imagist Poets (1915), Lowell identifies free verse in her list of “the essentials of all great poetry”:

To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence is a new idea. (1915, [2009])

One of the most famous examples of one such imagist, free verse poem is William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” (although it has become known by this title, it was only assigned the numerical title “XXII” when it was originally published in Spring and All [1923]). The poem is so short that we can include it here in full:

Spring and All

The poem has been the subject of keen debate — what does the image represent, if anything? Why does so much depend on the red wheelbarrow? Is the poem meant to represent the salience of everyday images and/or lived experience in general? Or something else? Here, the empty space is arguably as important as the words that are actually there — what is being left unsaid by the poem’s sparse, meditative, economical free verse?

The poetry of Williams and other imagists is at the minimalist end of the free verse spectrum, but it is important to stress that free verse does not have to be minimalist. As Wainwright argues, the poetry of Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) is a later example of free verse in a maximalist, expansionist mode: “[O’Hara] shares the modernist fear of the pretentiously ‘poetic’, but rather than trying to pare it away he seeks to bury it by being talkative and exuberant” (2015). Wainwright highlights poems such as “Les Luths,” appearing in 1965’s Love Poems (Tentative Title), which thrums with O’Hara’s witty everyday language while, at the same time, reflecting on that most traditional and serious of poetic subjects: love.   

Is free verse truly free, or does it simply work under a different set of constraints? Bradford points out that “Even those poets who reject rhyme and meter retain in free verse the unit that is the distinctive feature of poems: the poetic line” (2010). As well as the poetic line, poets (arguably) still have to consider such matters as stress, language choice, and rhythm in order to achieve the effects they want. As T.S. Eliot noted, “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job” (quoted by Charles O. Hartman in Verse, 2015). 

It could be argued, then, that the effective and powerful use of the English language requires some kind of restriction on its use — that no well-crafted poetry can ever be truly free. In a similar vein to T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost famously compared free verse to playing tennis without a net (W.M. Thomas Hill, “Sandburg, Carl,” in The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, 2000).  

Some poets might argue, though, that such apparent restrictions as “the poetic line” are actually, in their own way, liberating; freeing their poetry to more accurately mimic the chaos of human thought in a way that is not possible with prose, and opening up new imaginative avenues. Together with the freedom to ignore meter and rhyme, free verse (though still following the poetic line) may arguably be seen as the most liberating form of expression.

While some argue that the rules of traditional poetic form are necessary in order to produce effective poetry, others argue that such constraints hold poetry back — that free verse releases poetry’s full creative potential. Wainwright, for example, makes the case that “Free verse of course does not do away with rhythm. What it does do is bring in the opportunity for very particular, intuitive variation, Blake’s ‘variety in every line’” (2015). 

Wherever you might stand on the free verse debate, there is no arguing with its influential legacy. Free verse has been the most popular form of poetry since the 20th century — eclipsing previous historical titans such as blank verse, and employed by popular poets such as Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) and Maya Angelou (1928–2014). Free verse continues to flourish today, all across the world. As Richard Andrews argues,

A Prosody of Free Verse

The wide range of free verse forms used in world poetry suggests that although each culture has its own formal and metrical verse forms, free verse is the norm. Whereas at the start of the 20th century, in the Euro-American tradition at least, the default forms were metrically based, the turning points of the first 20 years of that century (or the last 20 years of the 19th century in France) marked not just a temporary aberration and an experimental excursion into free verse but a key moment in poetic history. Whereas metrical verse forms were the norm and free verse a matter of choice, now the reverse is the case. (2016)

The rich body of postcolonial poetry provides just one example of free verse’s centrality in modern times. Andrews notes that poets such as Derek Walcott (1930–2017) tend to “eschew the conventional metrical forms for free verse forms” as they search for a new voice: 

It is as if the finding of a distinctive voice needs also to find new rhythms and new poetic structures, partly by reference to or in opposition to those of the ‘old countries’ and partly by capturing and developing local speech and/or song rhythms. (2016)

This short guide has selected only a few highlights from the vast body of free verse that exists: for a more detailed exploration of free verse and its place in poetic history, please refer to our further reading section below.

Contemporary Poetry (2011) by Nerys Williams

Theorists of Modernist Poetry (2007) by Rebecca Beasley

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015) by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers 

Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse (2017) by G.S. Fraser

The Situation of Poetry (2020) by Robert Pinsky

The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry (2013) by Rhian Williams

Andrews, R. (2016) A Prosody of Free Verse. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1635405/a-prosody-of-free-verse-explorations-in-rhythm-pdf 

Blake, W. (2014) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Floating Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1278524/marriage-of-heaven-and-hell-pdf 

Blake, W. (2021) Complete Works of William Blake. Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2704120/complete-works-of-william-blake-illustrated-songs-of-innocence-and-of-experience-the-marriage-of-heaven-and-hell-the-four-zoas-jerusalem-milton-and-others-pdf 

Bradford, R. (2010) Poetry: The Ultimate Guide. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2997554/poetry-the-ultimate-guide-pdf 

Bruns, G. (2007) On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy : A Guide for the Unruly. Fordham University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2329995/on-the-anarchy-of-poetry-and-philosophy-a-guide-for-the-unruly-pdf 

Hartman, C. (2015) Verse. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/998390/verse-an-introduction-to-prosody-pdf 

Hindus, M. (ed.) (2014) Walt Whitman. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1662617/walt-whitman-pdf 

LeMaster, J. R. and Kummings, D. D. (eds.) (2013) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1676942/the-routledge-encyclopedia-of-walt-whitman-pdf 

Lowell, A. (2009) “Preface,” in H.D. et al. (eds.) Some Imagist Poets. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1825880/some-imagist-poets-an-anthology-pdf 

Robertson, M. (2021) Worshipping Walt. Princeton University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2629268/worshipping-walt-the-whitman-disciples-pdf   

Rowcroft, A. (2022) “Free Verse,” in Gill, P. (ed.) An Introduction to Poetic Forms. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3804911/an-introduction-to-poetic-forms-pdf 

Tuten, N. and Zubizarreta, J. (eds.) (2000) The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4173871/the-robert-frost-encyclopedia-pdf 

Wainwright, J. (2015) Poetry: The Basics. 3rd edn. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1563374/poetry-the-basics-pdf 

Poetry Articles

What is Imagism?

What is Free Verse?

What is Modernist Literature?

What is New Criticism?