A term you'll meet in poetic form.
Free verse is poetry that abandons regular meter and rhyme. It has no fixed beat per line and no set rhyme scheme. But "free" is misleading: the best free verse is highly controlled — it simply finds its order in rhythm, line breaks, and image rather than in a metrical template.
Free verse is free of two things: a predictable meter (like iambic pentameter) and an obligatory rhyme scheme. It is not free of rhythm, sound, or structure. A free-verse poet still shapes the line — deciding where it breaks, how long it runs, where the stresses fall — and those decisions carry the music that meter would otherwise supply.
Without meter, the line break does extra work. Where a line ends — whether it stops on a strong word or spills over via enjambment into the next — controls pace, emphasis, and surprise. In free verse, reading the line breaks is reading the poem; they are the form.
Walt Whitman pioneered long, surging, list-like free-verse lines in Leaves of Grass. The modernists — Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams — pared it down, insisting (in Pound's phrase) on composing "in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." It has been the dominant mode of poetry ever since.
Don't confuse the two. Blank verse is unrhymed but strictly metrical (iambic pentameter). Free verse drops the meter too. Blank verse keeps the beat and loses the rhyme; free verse loses both and keeps only what the poet chooses to impose.
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