[R. S. Gwynn]

Lew wrote free verse, but he strongly disliked the term, arguing that "verse" by definition was metrical and thus could not be "free." I don't have a copy of The Book of Forms handy, so someone can check what he had to say about it in the later editions. I do know that he discussed, at some point, Hebrew prosody as based on anaphora and other types of repetition, but that doesn't say anything about the length of the lines. To say that Whitman used a prosody based on repetition doesn't say anything about the lines themselves, which can range across the page and more. I may be wrong, but I think Lew argued that free verse was simply prose broken into lines; however, the breaking of groups of words (phrases, sentences) would seem to indicate a type of verse (the old notion of the turn of the plow at the end of the furrow). Thoughts?