AP® English Literature and Composition · Poetry Craft: Meter, Rhythm and Scansion
3.C Blank Verse and Free Verse (STR-1.V)
Blank verse keeps a steady five-beat meter but drops rhyme, so speech can run on naturally. Free verse drops meter entirely and builds its shape from line length, breath, and repetition instead.
Rhyme gives a line a destination the ear waits for. Drop it and the line can end without a chime, so a sentence keeps moving the way actual thought or speech does. That is the whole appeal of blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. The meter stays, five beats per line, da-DUM five times, so the language still has a pulse. But without rhyme locking each line shut, a speaker can run a thought across two, three, four lines before the sentence finally lands. That is why blank verse became the sound of dramatic speech. It is regular enough to feel like verse, loose enough to feel like a person talking.
Free verse gives up the meter too. No fixed count of beats, no required foot. So what holds it together? Line breaks, breath, repetition, the shape of images on the page. A free verse poem decides where lines end not to keep a beat count but to control pacing, emphasis, or silence. A short line can isolate a word. A long line can rush a thought forward. Repetition of a phrase can do the organizing work that meter used to do.
This is why blank verse and free verse sit next to each other but are not the same thing. Blank verse is unrhymed but still metrical. Free verse is unrhymed and unmetrical. Both reject rhyme for the same reason, to let syntax breathe, but blank verse keeps one discipline, the beat, while free verse answers to no fixed pattern at all, relying instead on whatever structure the poet invents line by line.
Key terms
- blank verse
- Unrhymed poetry written in a regular meter, almost always iambic pentameter.
- free verse
- Poetry with no fixed meter or rhyme scheme, organized instead by line length, repetition, or breath.
- iambic pentameter
- A line of five iambs, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, ten syllables total.
- enjambment
- Letting a sentence or phrase run past the end of a line without a pause or punctuation.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does unrhymed iambic pentameter let a speech run on like real talk?
- How it worksHow does free verse build a pattern out of line length and breath instead of meter?
- Worked exampleWalk me through hearing the blank verse under 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't free verse the same thing as blank verse?
- Going furtherWhat takes over the work of meter once a poem abandons it completely?
Check yourself
End of topic.