Sometimes known as vers libre, free verse has a long pedigree and is very common in contemporary poetry. Yet there are still voices that claim poetry is only poetry when it is formal verse, and would agree with Robert Frost who, when asked about free verse, said "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down". Fans of free verse can counter with T S Eliot's insistence that "no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job" - the net may be down, but this allows a poet (of either gender) to play to different rules. Simon Armitage's 'You're Beautiful', for example, creates for himself a set of rules that includes repeated words at the starts of phrases, rather than a structure of repeated sounds at the end of lines.
