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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An aside: I like to generalize from prosody and particular meters to the idea that “formal verse” (for lack of a better expression) involves counting something (stresses, syllables, alliterations, words, keystrokes) while “free verse” (again, for lack of a better expression) doesn’t involve counting anything.
For the past few years I've been emphasizing that a paragraph is really a single line. "The right hand margin doesn't mean anything in prose as it does in poetry," I tell my students. I thought about this also when reading your post on enjambment. I've been getting into Mallarmé recently ("The Crisis of Verse", "A Throw of the Dice"), developing my idea that a paragraph is, ideally, one minute of the reader's attention, deliberately composed by the writer, who has about 200 words to deploy freely, occupying about half a page. The poet, perhaps, (or at least Mallarmé's poet), has a page (or two pages, with the fold between them) to work with just a freely? The poet works in space, the prose writer in time. (And yet prosody is of course also very much about time, rhythm.)
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