The Enclosures of Free Verse: Racializing Poetic Form in the Modernist Era

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars accepted that there was something called “traditional” poetic meter, and that free verse liberated poets from the fetters of old forms. In this version of literary history, free verse saved poetry from cultural irrelevance and marked a broadly oppositional politics. This book tells a different story—and offers a radically new account of the rise of free verse poetry in the United States.

In the 1910s, white academics, editors, and critics popularize...