Free Verse in Beat Generation Literature
The Beat poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg, really dug Walt Whitman. Why? Not only was he generally a super-sweet poet, he was the Granddaddy of free verse. Free verse is poetry that throws regular rhyme and meter out the window.
Lines can be very long and very short as they please. And words inside a line of free verse, rather than at the end of it, can rhyme with each other to create a unique, surprising sound (this technique is called internal rhyme). So it's not that "free verse" lacks any style at all.
Instead, freeverse allows for poets to better get down with the rhythms of their own bad hearts, rather than sounding more like stuff that's been written before—like all those English sonnets, which are the lit tradition's version of The Hit Pop Song Formula.
And you know what else the Beat writers loved? Jazz. Which, just like free verse, was characterized by breaking the "rules" of classical music. And by improvisation.
This bit of on-the-fly magic inspired Beat authors, too. Many of 'em rarely edited their writing; they preferred to write stream-of-consciousness works—to improvise with words—and let their readers enjoy whatever came burning out of their souls.
Chew on This:
Allen Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish" is comprised of long, run-on sentences that have different lengths and no rhyme schemes. Classic free verse stylee, Shmoopers. But you might wonder: if it shirks the conventions of old-timey English verse forms, how do we know that it's actually poetry?
Well, for one thing, it makes our hearts sing. Plus, it's full of other poetic devices. How many literary techniques can you find in the first thirty lines? And… Go.
In "Bomb," rule-breaker Gregory Corso dismissed rhymes altogether. Even more exciting, he arranged the words on the page to form an atomic mushroom cloud. So the form mimics the content. Now that's seriously messing with convention. Rock.