Vers libre

Vers libre is an open form of poetry that abandons consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or other forms of musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Vers libre is a poetic form of flexibility, complexity and naturalness created in the late 19th century in France, in 1886, largely through the activities of La Vogue, a weekly journal founded by Gustave Kahn, and the appearance of a band of poets unequalled at any one time in the history of French poetry, the ‘Counter-Romanticism’ led by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Corbière, concerned with synaethesis (the harmony or equilibrium of sensation) later described as ‘the moment when French poetry began to take consciousness of itself as poetry’. Gustave Kahn was commonly supposed to have invented the term Vers libre and according to F. S. Flint 'was undoubtedly the first theorist of the techniques'. Later in 1912, Robert de Souza published his conclusion on the genre 'that a vers libre was possible which would keep all the essential characteristics of vers classique, but would free it from the encumbrances which usage had made appear indispensable'. Thus the practice of verse libre was not the abandoning of pattern, but the creation of an original and complicated metrical form for each poem.

The formal stimuli for vers libre were vers libéré (French verse of the late 19th century that liberated itself from classical rules of versification whilst observing the principle of isosyllabism and regular patterned rhyme), and vers libre classique (a minor French genre of the 17th and 18th century which conformed to classic concepts, but in which lines of different length were irregularly and unpredictable combined), and vers populaire (versification derived from oral aspects of popular song).Remy de Gourmont's Livre des Masques gave definition to the whole vers libre movement, noting there should arise, at regular intervals, a full and complete line, which reassures the ear and guides the rhythm.

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