What the hell is the difference between free verse """""poetry""""" and just prose?

You're right. I can change my last response:

Free Verse Poetry has rhytmm without fixed rigid meter.

On the contrary, only OP can inb4, you twat.

That's quite profound. Who is this Netero? Some sort of ancient religious figure?

I was just about to start a thread, but I guess I'll just derail this one.

Where do I start with free verse poetry? I've been pretty interested in it lately but I have no idea about poetry

This desu
If you can read and enjoy premodern poetry you should be able to enjoy free verse as well (the good shit, of course, not slam poetry).

I get what you're trying to say but your definitions are incorrect. Both prose and poetry are, using your words, styles of writing. Both can be applied to any of the three branches of literature - narrative, lyric and drama. Lyric is 99% poetry but you also have lyric prose (Rimbaud or Baudelaire wrote it first, I don't remember exactly), so it isn't synonymous with poetry (which can also be narrative - see Homer).

What the hell does it even mean - 'rhythm without meter'
Meter is rhythm. Any fag can recite anything, and with right scansion make it 'beat'. That's why music lyrics are almost never written in meter.

Ah ok. See, I was lurking lit for a few months before trying to post and couldn't for the life of me figure out what the fuck everyone was on about, so I just started googling definitions and that's basically what I got from the google definition. Thanks for elaborating that.

It's a sublime paradox to break off thinking and feeling.
It's to find harmony in chaos. It's a very difficult thing to do, obviously not something a fag who recite can do, but something a illuminated man like Walt Whitman can do.

Begin with Whitman and end with Eliot

Read the lovesong of j Alfred prufrock.
You can easily feel the rhythm (and sometimes rhyme) even though there is no set line length, rhyme scheme or set meter.

I only know Walt Whitman. Try Song for Myself, and when you get stunned or confused, go outside to live your life and get back. You will be thrilled every time you read that.
The rest of Leave of Grass is amazing too, but it's too dense, at least for me, to finish.

thanks, any books in particular that collect their free-verse work?

Great, thanks.
Leaves of Grass is on my list of books to buy, how much of it is free-verse? It definitely seems pretty dense

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness
of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread
blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of
white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-
blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps
give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on
blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted
September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense
gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding
darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

Start at 2:47
youtube.com/watch?v=CySyV5Ys8bA

Don't judge this book by its cover. It's more complex than it seems.
If you don't believe in the words of an anime with simple draws, read "The Hero Of The Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell. It analyzes the meaning of the mith, and in one of the chapters, it talks about "Bodhisattva", the step before Budah ilumination.

It's all free-verse. Every poem (at leats the ones I've read) it's a perfect synthesis of the theme Whitman is talking about, and I'm pretty sure the whole book is a perfect synthesis of life. It's a book he wrote all his life... and with every edition it was getting better and better. That's why it's so dense and beautiful.

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

I'm guessing this illusion is what the "rhythm without meter is totally real guise!" are talking about

>In our final demonstration, speech is made to be heard as song, and this is achieved without transforming the sounds in any way, or by adding any musical context, but simply by repeating a phrase several times over. The demonstration is based on a sentence at the beginning of the CD Musical Illusions and Paradoxes. When you listen to this sentence in the usual way, it appears to be spoken normally - as indeed it is. However, when you play the phrase that is embedded in it: 'sometimes behave so strangely' over and over again, a curious thing happens. At some point, instead of appearing to be spoken, the words appear to be sung, rather as in the figure below.
deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=212

Prufrock and other observations
The wasteland
Ash Wednesday
The four quartets

It's a rhythm you can feel with your normal perceptions... but you can percieve with your soul.