A misleading label
English “free verse” can suggest the absence of metre. In Arabic modernist practice, many poems still use a tafʿīla (metrical foot) while abandoning the fixed two-hemistich bayt and sustained rhyme.
Conversation with tradition
As Huda J. Fakhreddine notes, the movement’s formal experiments remain a dialogue with the Arabic canon—even when antagonistic—rather than a pure import of foreign forms.
Prose poem parallel
Qaṣīdat al-nathr steps further from ‘arūḍ. Noticing which contract a poem offers—foot, image, syntax—helps more than joining every debate about definitions.