Blank verse Vs Free verse

Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. lambic pentameter consists of ten syllables with the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables accented. Blank verse is the most widely-used verse pattern in English. Bengali poet Madhusudan Datta first introduced a similar verse pattern in Bengali named ‘amitraksar’.

Free verse has very few distinct rules or boundaries. It has a similarity with blank verse on the ground of its having no distinct rhyme pattern. But unlike blank verse, it has no metrical pattern. Free verse, as the name sounds, in fact, gives the author every freedom to write according to his free will. Thus free verse has no particular meter, rhyme pattern, or line structure.

If we go through Kaiser Haq’s “Ode on the Lungi”, we can identify that the poem is written in ‘free verse’. The following points can be identified:

i) The lines are of various lengths

ii) There is no particular meter

iii) There is no identical rhyme pattern

Therefore, it is obvious that the poem is written in free verse.