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Vers libre is a free-verse poetic form of flexibility, complexity, and naturalness created in the late 19th century in France, in 1886. It was largely through the activities of La Vogue, a weekly journal founded by Gustave Kahn, as well as the appearance of a band of poets unequaled at any one time in the history of French poetry. Their style of poetry was dubbed "Counter-Romanticism" and it was led by Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Laforgue and Corbière. It was concerned with synaethesis (the harmony or equilibrium of sensation) and later described as "the moment when French poetry began to take consciousness of itself as poetry." Gustave Kahn was commonly supposed to have invented the term vers libre and according to F. S. Flint, he "was undoubtedly the first theorist of the technique(s)." Later in 1912, Robert de Souza published his conclusion on the genre, voicing that "A vers libre was possible which would keep all the essential characteristics of vers Classique, but would free it from the encumbrances which usage had made appear indispensable." Thus the practice of vers libre was not the abandoning of pattern, but the creation of an original and complicated metrical form for each poem.
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