I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.