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
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His style is like free verse, at once spare and dense with feeling and meaning.
—Meghan Cox Gurdon, WSJ, 11 Oct. 2018
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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
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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
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This book for young readers, written in free verse, was the winner of a 2020 Newbery Honor.
—Jeff Suess, The Enquirer, 22 Apr. 2021
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Douglas, evidently not a fan of free verse, was unmoved.
—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Jan. 2018
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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
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Reynolds writes this in free verse, an effective strategy that packs an emotional punch.
—Susan Glaser, cleveland.com, 25 Jan. 2018
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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
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An astonishing statement, this, given that Pound is himself arguably the greatest free verse poet in the language!
—New York Times, 29 Apr. 2022
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Love at First is poetry, then — sometimes an artful sonnet, other times halting free verse.
—Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 1 Mar. 2021
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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
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Somehow, Acevedo’s powerful free verse manages to stay contained within the book’s covers.
—Julie Fogliano, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2018
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Written as prose poetry and free verse, the sweep is as vast as a life cycle: from childhood to parenthood to the loss of a parent, invoking an overall vision that is clear-eyed and skinned, yet somehow courageous and even hopeful.
—oregonlive, 9 Nov. 2019
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Glück’s free verse is exacting and taut and rhetorically organized.
—Dwight Garner, New York Times, 8 Oct. 2020
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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
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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
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Her riddles interleave what reads like a sociological thesis told in free verse.
—Washington Post, 7 Dec. 2021
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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
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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
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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
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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