Revolutions in Form: Free Verse and Tradition across the Atlantic Literary World

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence and evolution of free verse as both a revolutionary break and a subtle continuation of poetic tradition across the Atlantic literary world, particularly between Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass pioneered a democratic poetics that rejected conventional meter in favor of organic rhythm, Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes pushed experimentation further by combining free verse with visual innovation, showing how form could reflect modernity’s dynamism. Ezra Pound’s imagist manifestos and condensed verse, alongside T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, illustrate how modernist free verse was never an abandonment of tradition but an active reworking of inherited forms through fragmentation, allusion, and juxtaposition. At the same time, Wallace Stevens transformed free verse into a medium for philosophical reflection, linking sound, rhythm, and abstraction in ways that still dialogued with poetic conventions. By situating free verse in a comparative transatlantic framework, this paper argues that the form represented not merely chaos or rejection but an ongoing negotiation with tradition, challenging fixed notions of poetic authority while preserving the weight of historical memory. Ultimately, free verse emerges as a hybrid mode of poetic modernism—simultaneously radical and rooted—that bridged national contexts and demonstrated the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic.