White verse is the name of stop verses that do not have rhymes. The name has English roots. From English poetics, the definition of “blank verse” passed into French - “vers blanc”. So, white verses represented verses with the destroyed "erased" rhyme. The absence of rhyme was characteristic of ancient poets.
White verse is quite common in folk Russian poetry. In the works, the structural role is assigned to a certain clause (ending). In book poetry, by contrast, white verse is used less frequently.
The syllabic period in Russian poetry is characterized by the manifestation of special attention to rhyme. However, Trediakovsky saw as a basis not a rhyme, but a rhythm, a meter. It was he who first wrote the white verse, without rhyme.
After Trediakovsky, Cantemir translated the “Letters” of Horace Quintus Flaccus. This showed that syllabic poets considered the main thing in the verse not rhyme, but stop size, metric rhythm.
It should be said that in book poetry the antique dimensions, including the hexameter, were adopted without dispute. Moreover, the “white verse” of other sizes was not immediately accepted by poets.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Zhukovsky was the most decisive in defense of ringless works. He was supported by Koltsov, Pushkin, and partly Lermontov. Subsequently, the white verse becomes a ubiquitous phenomenon in poetry. He is considered the most accepted in dramatic works, as a rule, a five-foot iambic.
It should be noted that the lack of rhyme in the works does not deprive them of literary merits. In the white verse, as, however, in others, the figurativeness of the tongue, the clause, and the rhythm are preserved.
Despite the absolute absence of rhyme, harmony in the end of lines, stanzas are written in compliance with the requirements of the metric. In other words, the works consist of the same number of feet, one size is maintained. Comparing the “white” and “free” verses, the first sounds nicer. In the first case, the authors have more freedom in using expressive means, which makes the works very emotional.
A free verse is considered a iambic rhyming product, which is characterized by an unequal number (no more than six) feet in rows.
The free verse is used in the fables of Mikhalkov, Poor, Krylov. By the beginning of the nineteenth century , inscriptions, epitaphs, epigrams began to be published in this style. In the free verse, the drama “Masquerade” (Lermontov) and “Woe from Wit” (Griboedov's comedy) was created. In the first third of the nineteenth century, some elegy were written in a similar manner with a slight difference in the length of the line. With a large difference in the length of the line, lyrical works acquire a certain stylistic connotation, which is characteristic of fables.
Some poets who tried to write lyrical works “freely” did not find support. “Darling” (the poem of Bogdanovich) - the only poem performed in a free verse - remained isolated. Many literary scholars represent this style in a historical perspective as the successor of the national raeshnik. Both styles have a common system of unequal strings. A free verse does not differ in rhythmic periodicity; in this regard, it does not have the same melodiousness that is characteristic of a regular metric verse. At the heart of the freestyle is a two-part foot, which does not turn into a six-sided or four-sided foot and is very limited in modifications.
From the beginning of the twentieth century, the term “verliber” came from Western poetics. This definition characterized "free verse" - a few peculiar poetic formations. They differed from the syllabonic-tonic equivalent and syllabic verse. At first, the term “verliber” was used to name the works of French Symbolist poets translated into Russian .