There are two ways of looking at free verse. One, is that it should open the door toward greater metrical invention. It is an opportunity. It is freedom to do something else.
The other way: theoretically, it ought to lead to that, but in practice, it ends up being kind of dull and uninventive. Why? Because it is also the freedom to do nothing at all (or very little) prosodically.
Thus, we have double movement: toward innovation, with a first two groups of innovators, then mere stagnation.
Part of it is that there is no meaningful way of talking about it. Free verse practitioners tend not to want to talk about technical stuff, in actual linguistic rigor, so it becomes almost a mystique.
I say this because prosody could be almost the most objective thing there is. Where the syllables fall and where the accents are. Instead, it becomes mystical and ultra-subjective.
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