T. E. Hulme and
F. S. Flint first introduced the form to the London-based
Poets' Club in 1909. This later became the heart of the
Imagist movement through Flint's advocacy of the genre. Imagism, in the wake of French Symbolism (i.e. vers libre of French Symbolist poets) was the wellspring out of which the main current of
Modernism in English flowed.
T. S. Eliot later identified this as "the point de repere usually taken as the starting point of modern poetry," as hundreds of poets were led to adopt vers libre as their medium.