How to Use free verse in a Sentence

free verse

noun
  • How did the idea of spitting free verse come to mind for this project?
    — A.d. Amorosi, Variety, 24 June 2022
  • His style is like free verse, at once spare and dense with feeling and meaning.
    — Meghan Cox Gurdon, WSJ, 11 Oct. 2018
  • There was no such thing as free verse until the late 19th century.
    — Jason P. Frank, Vulture, 23 June 2026
  • Indeed, much of Dose’s best work has been free verse—rooted in hip-hop, but not stuck in it.
    — Spin Staff, SPIN, 31 Dec. 2022
  • His sentences come out as free verse, a sort of Rust Belt beat poetry.
    — Popular Mechanics, 14 Apr. 2023
  • Her language spills over the page in free verse that suggests Ntozake Shange but lays down its own rhythms.
    — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2019
  • The history of art reads here as one long, free verse poem-in-progress, gorgeous and absorbing.
    — Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr. 2026
  • Reynolds writes this in free verse, an effective strategy that packs an emotional punch.
    — Susan Glaser, cleveland.com, 25 Jan. 2018
  • Rhyming poems, like Reed’s, have fallen out of style this century in favor of free verse.
    — Danny Emerman, The Mercury News, 3 Feb. 2024
  • Love at First is poetry, then — sometimes an artful sonnet, other times halting free verse.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 1 Mar. 2021
  • Glück’s free verse is exacting and taut and rhetorically organized.
    — Dwight Garner, New York Times, 8 Oct. 2020
  • Her riddles interleave what reads like a sociological thesis told in free verse.
    — Washington Post, 7 Dec. 2021
  • This book for young readers, written in free verse, was the winner of a 2020 Newbery Honor.
    — Jeff Suess, The Enquirer, 22 Apr. 2021
  • Somehow, Acevedo’s powerful free verse manages to stay contained within the book’s covers.
    — Julie Fogliano, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2018
  • Still, the focus here remains the lyrics, which seem to flow unbidden from Elverum in long streams of hyper-detailed, confessional free verse.
    — Terence Cawley, BostonGlobe.com, 14 Mar. 2018
  • An astonishing statement, this, given that Pound is himself arguably the greatest free verse poet in the language!
    — New York Times, 29 Apr. 2022
  • The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume.
    — Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2022
  • Terse, direct, composed in free verse rather than meter, Imagist poetry sought to strip verse down to the bones and think exclusively through concrete images.
    — Charlie Tyson, The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2022
  • And in the freest of free verse poems, recurring images and motifs operate like punchlines in stand-up comedy, echoing earlier jokes in a routine.
    — Literary Hub, 7 Apr. 2026
  • Gunn became the prodigal son who never returned, and many English critics lined up to castigate him for running to seed—and to free verse—in America.
    — Matthew Bevis, Harper’s Magazine , 16 Feb. 2022
  • This came as no surprise to Smith, whose remarkable ability to recognize darkness while tenaciously holding onto hope is embodied in the 17 lines of free verse.
    — Jessica Dulong, CNN, 30 Nov. 2020
  • Marjorie Price’s illustrations are the perfect complement to this collection of both free verse and traditional poetry.
    — Augusta Scattergood, The Christian Science Monitor, 18 May 2020
  • The poem’s narrative frequently shifts between different speakers and languages, and Eliot employed a range of styles and techniques, including free verse and stream of consciousness.
    — René Ostberg, Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 June 2026
  • Told in a first-person, free verse style, her struggle to overcome a family tragedy, an ecological catastrophe, and the Great Depression is harrowing yet hopeful.
    — Libby Monteith Minor, Southern Living, 28 Feb. 2026
  • The event is open to anyone interested in learning about the modern haiku, senryu and haibun types of poetry, focusing on contemporary free verse forms, not the familiar five-seven-five-syllable structure.
    — Carole Goldberg, courant.com, 7 Aug. 2019
  • But no primer quite equips the reader for the free verse that follows — an exhale of recipes, memoir, travelogue, social commentary and gossip that illuminates one Black woman’s experience like no work of literature before or since.
    — Bill Addison, Los Angeles Times, 21 Nov. 2020
  • For Ginsberg, ever-attuned to the rhythmic physicality of verse, the central atom of poetry wasn’t the line or the foot, but rather the breath, emphasizing that his were longer than his free verse hero Whitman because the good, grey poet probably had smaller lungs.
    — Literary Hub, 3 June 2026
  • Like family feuds, squabbles among poets are too tedious to recount, but Wiman remembers being accused of commissioning too much prose, of privileging formalism over free verse, and of publishing vicious reviews and vacuous poetry.
    — Casey Cep, The New Yorker, 4 Dec. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'free verse.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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