Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
———(Cousin Nancy, T. S. Eliot)This is an example of Free Verse. Well, how do we know?
Last week we discussed Blank Verse. We know that there primarily are the two types of verse in English language, when referring to verse as a countable noun or as a unit of a poem: Blank Verse and Free Verse.
Free Verse is also known as vers libre from French, where the verse is not bound by rhyme patterns, metrical feet or rhythmic features, nevertheless, it could also have any or all of these features and yet is not restricted by a certain template stipulating any such features. And the above example of a stanza from T. S. Eliot’s poem Cousin Nancy demonstrates what a Free Verse is.