Free verse

Free verse (vers libre) is a type of versification that renounces fixed metre, rhyme and equal syllable count, building rhythm on syntactic and intonational parallelism, repetitions, pauses and the graphic division into lines. Free verse is not prose: its orderedness rests on the segmentation of the speech flow and on semantic emphasis rather than on a metrical scheme. The classic example is Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; in Ukrainian poetry free verse was used by Ivan Franko, and later, actively, by poets of the second half of the twentieth century and of the present day. Free verse grants the author maximal intonational freedom while demanding an especially precise feeling for rhythm and word.