Perloff on Free Verse forms

The so-called freedom of free verse must be understood in this context. When Pound declares in Canto 81, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave," he is speaking to a particular situation in late-Victorian "genteel" verse, when meter stood for a particular collective attitude, a social and cultural restriction on the "freedom" of the subject.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, coming out of an entirely different tradition, but in the same time period, makes a similar gesture when he declares in 1926, "Trochees and iambs have never been necessary to me. I don't know them and don't want to know them. Iambs impede the forward movement of poetry"