What's the difference between form poetry and free verse? A writer explains the difference and presents us with a few examples of each writing style.

You'll find many different schools of thought on the subject of form poetry. In my biased opinion, I'd rather not write it if I didn't have to. Form poetry includes all different types of poems that include sonnets, villanelles, and even haiku. They have rules by which the poem needs to be guided to be considered a villanelle or what have you.

The artists who favor form poetry tell you that those poems are more of an art form, and that they take more talent to write and are more beautiful to read. These people are probably right on all these accounts — although being more beautiful to read could be up for debate. I'll be the first to admit that William Shakespeare's sonnets, or Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night," are some of the finest poems I have ever read. Wonderful works that had to take incredible skill to write. I could never imagine that I might write anything as good as any of them, ever.

But there are some reasons why I don't like to write form poetry, and why it's not even that common among modern poets. Let's look at one example of a form poem — the Shakespearean sonnet. This poem has fourteen lines only, divided into three stanzas of four lines (quatrains) and one stanza of two lines (couplet). Each of the quatrains has a rhyme scheme of the first and third lines rhyming, and the second and fourth rhyming. The two lines of the couplet rhyme with each other, making what is known as a rhyming couplet .

Feeling bogged down yet? There's more. The meter is, of course, iambic pentameter. Shakespeare probably spoke iambic pentameter in his sleep, it was that much a part of everything he ever wrote. An iamb is an unaccented syllable followed by an accented. Pentameter means that there are five iambs per line. This equals a total of only ten syllables per line.

The purpose of this article is not to teach you how to write a Shakespearean sonnet. I'm merely trying to show you what you'd have to do to try to write one.

I like to be able to sit down and write a poem. Sure, I might take a few days, even weeks sometimes editing it, making sure each word is exactly the word I want. And there's my point right there: With such strict guidelines in a form poem, you can't always use the word that you want. Maybe it doesn't rhyme with what you want it to. Maybe the accents are reversed, and it won't fit.

With free verse, I feel that you are more able to express yourself. One idea can lead directly into another, and you can just go with it and see where it takes you. Later you can go back and delete lines, words or stanzas (or paragraphs, depending on your style), without worrying about what those deletions are doing to your rhyme scheme.

I don't want to give the impression that all form poetry is as hard as the sonnet type above. I could just as easily have given the illustration of a cinquain. It's similar to a haiku — it has five lines, with two syllables in the first line, four in the second, six in the third, eight in the fourth, and two again in the fifth. You have a little leniency with it, in that you can give it a title. It could look like this:

Soaked trees
Shaken by rain
Drip water on the ground
Weeping from storms they have weathered
Mourners

Or, if you want to have some fun with it:

"I Told My Roommate Once"

Belly button lint grows
out of nowhere but I
hear it has high nutritional
value.

Now, you might ask yourself, 'Why is he showing two examples of a cinquain, and none of a Shakespearean sonnet?' Because there are fewer rules to this shorter art form, and it's more fun for me to write. There are even fewer rules in free verse — the main one being, enjoy yourself. You might say I take the lazy poet's way of doing things, but I prefer to think of it as better content for less work. And I'm sure that Shakespeare thought the same thing when he wrote his sonnets — he just didn't realize that not everybody thought in iambic pentameter.


About the author:
Rob Brooks is a freelance writer and editor. He also works in starting a family, working a full-time job, and running an independent record label. In his spare time, he likes to sleep. Visit his webpage at http://www.selectivehearingrecords.com/robbrookswriter.html or email him at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .