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Irregular verse

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Poetry that eschews consistent meter or rhyme, embracing irregularity in rhythm, line length, or structure for expressive or modernist aims.

Detailed Definition
Irregular verse is poetry that eschews traditional forms, meters, and rhyme schemes in favor of organic, unpredictable structures shaped by content rather than convention; it prioritizes authenticity of voice and emotional truth over formal symmetry, central to much modern and contemporary practice.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem written entirely in free verse, such as much of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which eschews traditional meter and rhyme schemes; A modern long poem where stanzas have varying line lengths and the meter changes frequently, moving from iambic to trochaic or from pentameter to trimeter within the same work; A work in which the poet uses internal rhyme and assonance in place of a regular end-rhyme pattern and varies the number of feet per line; William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," which has four stanzas of two lines each, where the lines alternate between three and one word, defying a regular metrical or strophic design
Additional Notes
Irregular verse: Poetry that lacks a consistent, fixed metrical, stanzaic, or rhyming pattern; includes free verse and poems that mix various traditional forms without a unifying plan; allows for great expressive freedom.
Also Known As
free verse non-metrical verse irregular prosody Anisometric verse Asynartetic verse Doggerel Heteroclite verse
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