Kenneth Allott, the poet and critic, said the adoption by some poets of
vers libre arose from "mere desire for novelty, the imitation of
Whitman, the study of
Jacobean dramatic
blank verse, and the awareness of what French poets had already done to the
alexandrine in France." The American critic
John Livingston Lowes in 1916 observed "Free verse may be written as very beautiful
prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which?"
