Free verse in English was persuasively advocated by critic
T. E. Hulme in his
A Lecture on Modern Poetry (1908). Later in the preface to
Some Imagist Poets 1916, he comments, "Only the name is new, you will find something much like
vers libre in
Dryden's
Threnodia Augustalis; a great deal of
Milton's
Samson Agonistes, and the oldest in
Chaucer's House of Fame."
