Should Beginners Write Free Verse or Formal Poetry?
Quick answer: Should beginners write free verse or formal poetry? Start with free verse to find your material, then borrow forms as training. The honest case for both.
Start with free verse. It lets you concentrate on the skills that matter most at the beginning, images, honesty, line breaks, without simultaneously wrestling metre and rhyme schemes, which is like learning to drive in traffic while juggling. Most contemporary published poetry is free verse, so you will also be learning the dominant mode of the art as it is actually practised.
But 'start with' is not 'stay with'. Formal exercises, a sonnet attempted, a villanelle survived, are the fastest strength training poetry offers, because constraints force choices free verse lets you dodge. The sensible path for a beginner is free verse as home base with regular formal excursions, rather than a permanent vow to either camp. The two feed each other more than their partisans admit.
The case for free verse first
A beginner juggling rhyme, metre and meaning drops meaning first, every time. Workshop leaders see it weekly: a rhyming beginner writes 'I wandered down beside the sea / because my heart longed to be free', where 'free' exists purely because 'sea' demanded it. The rhyme is steering; the poet is a passenger. Free verse removes that steering wheel and leaves you facing the real beginner's work: is this image true, is this word necessary, does this line break earn its pause? Master those questions and you have the foundation everything else stacks on.
Free verse is emphatically not formless, and treating it as prose with random breaks is the beginner's other ditch. Its form is made fresh each poem from rhythm, breath and the line, which is harder to fake than a rhyme scheme, just easier to start.
The case for formal excursions
Form is a gym. Write one sonnet and you learn compression, because fourteen lines is fewer than you think; you learn the turn, because the form demands the argument shift; and you learn that constraint generates ideas, because hunting a rhyme for 'window' drags up thoughts you did not know you had. Poets from Heaney to contemporary formalists have described form as a way of outwitting the conscious mind. Even failed formal poems pay: the beginner who limps through a villanelle returns to free verse hearing rhythm everywhere. Treat forms as training weights, picked up deliberately and set down without guilt.
A practical sequence for the first year
You do not need to choose a camp; you need a sequence.
What contests and journals actually prefer
Beginners often assume formal poems look more professional to editors and judges. They do not; they look exactly as good as they are, and a forced rhyme is more visible than a flat free-verse line. Judging criteria such as Writory's five, creativity, emotion, structure, language, theme, are form-neutral: 'structure' means the poem's shape serves its meaning, which a well-built free verse poem satisfies completely and a wrenched sonnet fails. Write the poem in whichever mode lets it be most alive. That is the only preference that reliably exists.
What poets can take from this
- Begin in free verse and put your attention on images and line breaks.
- Never let a rhyme choose your meaning; if it steers, drop it.
- Use haiku to learn compression before attempting rhymed forms.
- Write your first sonnet as an exercise, with permission to fail.
- Steal formal skills, rhythm, turns, back into your free verse.
- Judge each poem by aliveness, not by which camp it belongs to.
Try it yourself
Write a 12-line free verse poem about a repeated childhood sound. Then recast the same material as three haiku. Notice what each container forced you to keep and to cut.
Questions
Is free verse easier than formal poetry?
Easier to start, not easier to master. Free verse removes metre and rhyme but replaces them with harder invisible demands: every line break and rhythm choice must be made from scratch. Bad free verse is simply easier to produce than bad sonnets.
Do poems have to rhyme?
No. Most poetry published today does not rhyme, and no reputable journal or contest requires it. Rhyme is one tool among many; used well it delights, used under duress it wrecks meaning faster than any other beginner habit.
What formal poem should a beginner try first?
Haiku first, for compression without rhyme, then a Shakespearean sonnet, whose alternating rhymes are more forgiving than couplets. Save villanelles and sestinas for when you fancy an honest fight.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.