Despite having become the dominant form of lyric poetry published in the 20^th century (Poetry Foundation), free verse remains a nebulous form and the subject of scholarly debate. “The exact denotation of the term has long been disputed, and usage varies in whether other organizing principles such as rhyme scheme, syllable count, or count of strong stresses are excluded. Because most definitions are negative and/or metaphorical, the positive features characteristic of free verse are somewhat undefined” (Poetry Foundation), free verse remains a nebulous form and the subject of scholarly debate. “The exact denotation of the term has long been disputed, and usage varies in whether other organizing principles such as rhyme scheme, syllable count, or count of strong stresses are excluded. Because most definitions are negative and/or metaphorical, the positive features characteristic of free verse are somewhat undefined” (Cooper 2012: 757). These debates remain even as machine learning classifiers have been shown to be consistently capable of identifying free verse from other poetic forms (Baumann et al. 2018, Walsh et al. 2024).(Cooper 2012: 757). These debates remain even as machine learning classifiers have been shown to be consistently capable of identifying free verse from other poetic forms (Baumann et al. 2018, Walsh et al. 2024).

Given the lack of a positive definition, a history on the development and diffusion of free verse remains opaque. Traditional historical scholarship attribute T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint’s 1909 lectures on French Symbolist poetry at the Poetry Club of London as the pivotal year and moment that introduced the form in English (Encyclopedia Brittanica, Thacker 2011:11). However, left out of this genealogical history are the varying ways in which Modernist poets understood and engaged with free verse in the development of the form: Modernist free verse poets would position their work as the extension of ‘predecessors’ like Walt Whitman (Burroughs 1922:278, Kappeler 2019, Monroe 1924:693, Winant 2020:66) while also positioning free verse as an iconoclastic and radical break from pre-existing poetic forms (Martin 2012, 4). (Encyclopedia Brittanica, Thacker 2011:11). However, left out of this genealogical history are the varying ways in which Modernist poets understood and engaged with free verse in the development of the form: Modernist free verse poets would position their work as the extension of ‘predecessors’ like Walt Whitman (Burroughs 1922:278, Kappeler 2019, Monroe 1924:693, Winant 2020:66) while also positioning free verse as an iconoclastic and radical break from pre-existing poetic forms (Martin 2012, 4).

We seek to contribute to this literary history by using computational tools to explore this history empirically, at a scale that was not previously viable with traditional literary techniques. This project attempts to trace the genesis, development, and dissemination of free verse as a poetic form and its surrounding discourses with the use of compactional techniques. We seek to explore where, when, and how free verse appeared and how these formations were understood given the existing discourses about poetry in the Anglo-American literary field.

Free Verse as a Discourse

To explore the discursive formation and change of free verse over time, we used data from the Princeton Prosody Archive, “a full-text searchable database of thousands of digitized books in English published between 1532 and 1929” that “collects historical documents and highlights discourses about the study of language, the study of poetry, and where and how these intersect and diverge” (Martin 2025, Princeton Prosody Archive). We find that discussion and uses of the terms ‘free verse’ and ‘vers libre’ precede Hulme’s and Flint’s lectures of 1909, with scholarship on and usage of these terms increasing exponentially after 1909. Additionally, we find that articles about free verse is led by the phrase ‘free verse’ over ‘vers libre’, suggesting that the English formulation outpaced the French loanword.

Fig.1 Distirbution of entries in the Princeton Prosody Archive.

Figure 2. Distribution of works containing the words “free verse”, “vers libre”, and combined.

Figure 3. Distribution of word count of “free verse” and “vers libre”.

LDA topic models of these articles on free verse (filtered with regex matches of the words ‘free verse’ and ‘vers libre’) reveals expected topics like ‘metricity’ (topic 0, associated with words like “verse”, “prose”, “line”, “verse”, “rhythmic”); ‘associated figures and publications’ (topic 3, “Poetry”, “Edgar Lee Masters” and his collection, “Spoon River Anthology”, “Amy Lowell”, “Carl Sandburg”); ‘French’ (topic 8, “de”, “la”, “le”, “et”, “à”); and ‘aesthetics’ (topic 2, “poetry”, “poet”, “art”, “form”, “thing”, “new”, “expression”). But LDA topic models also revealed more surprising topics like ‘musicality’ (topic 9, “experience”, “pulse”, “syncopation”, “coincidence”, “timer”); ‘German’ (topic 10, “German”, “geschichte”, “metrik”, “der”, “die”); and ‘historic contextualization’ (topic 5, “stanza”, “ode”, “classic”, “Milton”, “Dryden”, “Greek”, “blank”, “drama”).

Figure 4. Topic model of works from the Princeton Prosody Archive containing “free verse“ and “vers libre”

Each of these topics recontextualize the existing linear genealogy of free verse from French Symbolist poetry to English verse by suggesting that Modernists were thinking of free verse alongside other artistic forms like music, national cultures (like German), and existing poets and poetic forms like John Milton and blank verse.

Free Verse as a Poetic Form

To explore how free verse as a poetic form diffused through modernist poetic networks, we applied a LLM as a classifier on existing network of Modernist poetry. We first surveyed the performance of large language models (LLMs) in poetic classification tasks. In line with prior research on LLM performance in poetry classification tasks (Walsh et al. 2024), we find that open-source LLMs like Gemma 3 with 27 billion parameters consistently perform sufficiently well (F1 score of .792) in distinguishing free verse from non-free verse poems with zero-shot prompting (see below for prompt). We then applied the Gemma classifier on Richard Jean So and Hoyt Long’s corpus of 19,459 poems from 19 major modernist literary magazines between 1910 to 1930 (So and Long 2013). Doing so reveals the development and spread of free verse to be an uneven process. First, modernist little magazines like (So and Long 2013). Doing so reveals the development and spread of free verse to be an uneven process. First, modernist little magazines like Poetry, The Little Review, and Others published a greater ratio of free verse poems and poets than magazines from trade publications like Harper’s and Scribner’s. Surprisingly, political magazines like The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and The Liberator also published more free verse poems and poets than trade publications, lending more support to the idea to the politicization of free verse. Second, co-occurrence networks of poets and publications using different centrality measures not only confirms the findings from past scholarship on the role of publications and poets in mediating the literary field (So and Long 2013), they also reveal that the central, canonical modernist poets (like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Mina Loy) and journals (like (So and Long 2013), they also reveal that the central, canonical modernist poets (like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Mina Loy) and journals (like Poetry, The Little Review, and Others) were also instrumental in the diffusion of free verse.

Figure 5. Ratio of free verse poems by journal

Centrality measures like PageRank (Soni et al. 2024) were also instrumental in bringing to light the important work done by marginalized poets such as Effie Lee Newsome, an African American poet hired by W. E. B. Du Bois to The Crisis to refute “the misconceptions about blacks that produce exploitation and bigotry,” give “expression to the realities of Black experience,” and utilize “the aesthetic conventions pertinent to … children’s literature of the 1920s” (MacCann 1988:60). While Newsome was a central figure of the era in mediating poets, publications, and the diffusion of the free verse form (as evidenced by her PageRank centrality score), her contributions have gone largely unrecognized by literary scholarship. It was through the combination of computational techniques that the full extent of Newsome’s contributions to the field came to light in this study. (MacCann 1988:60). While Newsome was a central figure of the era in mediating poets, publications, and the diffusion of the free verse form (as evidenced by her PageRank centrality score), her contributions have gone largely unrecognized by literary scholarship. It was through the combination of computational techniques that the full extent of Newsome’s contributions to the field came to light in this study.

Prompt used: "Is this poem a work of free verse? Answer only with 1 for 'yes' or 0 for 'no':

{text}

Only respond with 1 or 0."