Difference between free verse and prose

Prose and poetry are two dimensions of literature. While prose focuses on the content of the statements avoiding excessive usage of metaphors, poetry focuses on the shape of the statement and uses metaphors with no hesitation and limitations. Well, both has some relevant content and that is equally important for both, but the style of the expression differs. 

Free Verse

A free verse is just a style of the poetry. Normally, in a piece of poetry, there are metered verses. So rhyme and rhythm become very important. Let us take an example:

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

But the free verse is free from these metered lines. Let us take an example:

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.”

– Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

It is not totally free, however

However, a free verse is not totally free. It should be poetic, in flow and beautifully shaped. It must not be like a piece of prose. Yes, there could be no rhythm or rhyme scheme but still, it should look like poetry. The expression is to be artistic, it means. Such verses are decorated with the natural pauses and the natural rhythmic phrases.

Here comes the difference between a free verse and a piece of prose. A piece of prose need not bother for the artistic expressions and harmonic styles. The prose could be outright flat, but a free verse cannot.

Poets

Some of the famous pieces of the free verse have come from the pens of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Wright, John Ashbury etc. Naturally to understand the free verse, one should give some time to read such poets.