Editing Free verse (section)

==History==
Though individual examples of English free verse poetry surfaced before the 20th-century (parts of John Milton's ''[[Samson Agonistes]]'' or the majority of [[Walt Whitman]]'s poetry, for example),<ref name="deFord">{{cite book |last1=DeFord |first1=Sara |last2=Harriss |first2=Clarinda |title=Forms of verse: British and American |date=1971 |publisher=Appleton-Century-Crofts |location=New York |isbn=0390260002 |pages=292–293}}</ref> free verse is generally considered an early 20th century innovation of the late 19th-century French ''vers libre''.<ref name="deFord"/><ref>{{cite book |last1=Kirby-Smith |first1=Henry Tompkins |title=The origins of free verse |date=1996 |publisher=the University of Michigan press |location=Ann Arbor (Mich.) |isbn=0472106988 |page=10}}</ref>

[[T. E. Hulme]] and [[F. S. Flint]] first introduced the form to the London-based [[Poets' Club]] in 1909.<ref>Pondrom, Cryrena  ''The Road from Paris, French Influence on English Poetry'' 1900-1920 Cambridge University Press 1974 {{ISBN|978-0-521-13119-3}}</ref> This later became the heart of the [[Imagism|Imagist]] movement<ref>F. S. Flint, ''The History of Imagism'' Essay in The Egoist May 1915</ref> through Flint's advocacy of the genre.<ref>Jones Peter (editor) Introduction to ''Imagist Poetry'' Penguin Books {{ISBN|0-14-042147-5}}</ref> Imagism, in the wake of French Symbolism (i.e. vers libre of French Symbolist poets<ref>Pratt William ''Introduction to The Imagist Poem, modern poetry in miniature'' Uno Press 1963 edition {{ISBN|978-0-9728143-8-6}}</ref>) was the wellspring out of which the main current of [[Modernist poetry|Modernism]] in English flowed.<ref>Pratt William Preface to ''The Imagist Poem, modern poetry in miniature'' Uno Press 1963 edition {{ISBN|978-0-9728143-8-6}}</ref> [[T. S. Eliot]] later identified this as "the point de repere usually taken as the starting point of modern poetry,"<ref>Eliot T. S. Address ''To Criticize the Critic''  to Washington University June 1953, Faber & Faber 1965</ref> as hundreds of poets were led to adopt vers libre as their medium.<ref>Untermeyer, Louis, Preface to ''Modern American Poetry'' Harcourt Brace& Co New York 1950</ref>