From http://www.poeticbyway.com/:
FREE VERSE
A fluid form which conforms to no set rules of traditional versification. The free in free verse refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of meter and rhyme, but writers of free verse employ familiar poetic devices such as assonance, alliteration, imagery, caesura, figures of speech etc., and their rhythmic effects are dependent on the syllabic cadences emerging from the context. The term is often used in its French language form, vers libre. Walt Whitman's "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame," is an example of a poem written in free verse.
Sidelight: Although as ancient as Anglo-Saxon verse, free verse was first employed "officially" by French poets of the Symbolist movement and became the prevailing poetic form at the climax of Romanticism. In the 20th century it was the chosen medium of the Imagists and was widely adopted by American and English poets.
Sidelight: One of the characteristics that distinguish free verse from rhythmical prose is that free verse has line breaks which divide the content into uneven rhythmical units. The liberation from metrical regularity allows the poet to select line breaks appropriate to the intended sense of the text, as well as to shape the white space on the page for visual effect.
Sidelight: Free verse enjoys a greater potential for visual arrangement than is possible in metrical verse. Free verse poets can structure the relationships between white space and textual elements to indicate pause, distance, silence, emotion, and other effects.
Sidelight: Poorly written free verse can be viewed simply as prose with arbitrary line breaks. Well-written free verse can approach a proximity to the representation of living experience.
The American HeritageŽ Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.
FREE VERSE
NOUN: Verse composed of variable, usually unrhymed lines having no fixed metrical pattern.
Formal ("non-free") verse was (and is) largely a product of a memorization-based culture. Rhyme and meter make it enormously easier to memorize a poem, or to recite a poem to a group of people gathered around a campfire. Also, there is something satisfying-in-itself about rhyme and meter. You can tell this by the way children enormously prefer rhyming, metrical poems.
Today, with huge public and university libraries accessible to most people, with Google to help us find things, and with companies like Amazon selling zillions of books online, the memorization-based culture has largely been replaced by the I'm-familiar-with-it-and-I-know-where-to-find-it culture.
Today a typical serious poet may have memorized only a few poems, but have working familiarity with hundreds, or even thousands, of other poems. What I think is most important is that a person writing today be aware of the greater literary culture when penning his or her own works, or when reading a particular piece by another writer. I weary of people who feel that they are corrupting the vitality of their Muse by immersing themselves in the works of others. I say, READ, READ, READ -- read the masters, read the works of people who are better than you -- get drunk on their words. Then write your own!
Fred
I don't know if Bob's around to answer, but I question whether Anglo-Saxon verse is free? I thought it was accentual meter.
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