<P> Many poets of the Victorian era experimented with free verse . Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and T.E. Brown all wrote examples of rhymed but unmetered verse . Poems such as W.E. Henley's' Discharged' (from his In Hospital sequence). Free verse in English was persuasively advocated by critic T.E. Hulme in his A Lecture on Modern Poetry (1908). Later in the preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916, he comments, "Only the name is new, you will find something much like vers libre in Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis; a great deal of Milton's Samson Agonistes, and the oldest in Chaucer's House of Fame ." </P> <P> In France, a few pieces in Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem collection Illuminations were arranged in manuscript in lines, rather than prose and in the Netherlands, tachtiger (i.e. member of 1880s generation of innovative poets) Frederik van Eeden employed the form at least once (in his poem "Waterlelie" ("water lily")). </P> <P> Goethe (particularly in some early poems, such as "Prometheus") and Hölderlin used free verse occasionally, due in part to a misinterpretation of the meter used in Pindar's poetry; in Hölderlin's case, he also continued to write unmetered poems after discovering this error . The German poet Heinrich Heine made an important contribution to the development of free verse with 22 poems, written in two - poem cycles called' Die Nordsee' (The North Sea) (written 1825 - 1826). These were first published in Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) in 1827 . </P> <P> Although free verse requires no meter, rhyme, or other traditional poetic techniques, a poet can still use them to create some sense of structure . A clear example of this can be found in Walt Whitman's poems, where he repeats certain phrases and uses commas to create both a rhythm and structure . </P>

The american poet who pioneered free verse was