Vers libre Does Not Exist

Abstract This article pursues the metrical innovations that arose from adapting French vers libre to English. Far from hailing the liberation of verse from classical meter as an end in and of itself, poets from high modernism to the avant-gardes saw it as an opportunity to develop new metrical schemes. H.D. is on the forefront of these developments. Her poem »Hermes of the Ways« unfolds a ternary metrical structure inspired by the molossus. A close reading of this poem serves as an example for how a detailed metrical analysis can engage with twentieth-century poetry in English.