(a) Sometimes what is printed as "free verse" is nothing but prose disguised by the art of typography, i.e. judged by the ear, it is made up wholly of the rhythms of prose.
(b) Sometimes the prose rhythms predominate, without excluding a mixture of the recognized rhythms of verse.
(c) Sometimes verse rhythms predominate, and even fixed metrical feet are allowed to appear here and there.
(d) Sometimes verse rhythms and metres are used exclusively, although in new combinations which disguise or break up the metrical pattern.
A parody by F. P. A. in The Conning Tower affords a convenient illustration of the "a" type:
ADD SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
Peoria, Ill., Jan. 24.—The Spoon River levee, which protected thousands of acres of farm land below Havana, Ill., fifty-five miles south of here, broke this morning.
A score or more of families fled to higher ground. The towns of Havana,
Lewiston and Duncan Mills are isolated. Two dozen head of cattle are
reported drowned on the farm of John Himpshell, near Havana.—Associated
Press dispatch.
Edgar Lee Masters wrote a lot of things
About me and the people who
Inhabited my banks.
All of them, all are sleeping on the hill.
Herbert Marshall, Amelia Garrick, Enoch Dunlap,
Ida Frickey, Alfred Moir, Archibald Highbie and the rest.
Me he gave no thought to—
Unless, perhaps, to think that I, too, was asleep.
Those people on the hill, I thought,
Have grown famous;
But nobody writes about me.
I was only a river, you know,
But I had my pride,
So one January day I overflowed my banks;
It wasn't much of a flood, Mr. Masters,
But it put me on the front page
And in the late dispatches
Of the Associated Press.
It is clear that the quoted words of the Associated Press dispatch from Peoria are pure prose, devoid of rhythmical pattern, devoted to a plain statement of fact. So it is with the imaginary speech of the River. Not until the borrowed fourth line: