Thus any piece of writing that is broken in- to lines of irregular length may be called free verse, whether it advertises nylons, records Samson's celebration of light, or explains prosody dryly as this. Before this century most verse, free or otherwise, began each line with a capital letter. Most of the line breaks in free verse occur at the end of grammatical phrases, so the line break constitutes a kind of punctuation. The language is made to fit some predetermined design of the poet. Some poets, for example, have written on adding-machine tape to impose an arbitrary limit on the number of spaces and characters in a line.
Syllabic verse is the simplest, common type of metered verse.
Writers of accentual verse have to work at keeping the rhythm strong so as not to lose control of stress placement. Certain fixed combinations of number of syllables and placement of accent are called feet . Line length is then determined by the number of feet in a line. For example, the combination of one unaccented syllable and a following accented syllable is called an iamb . Falling meter refers to trochees and dactyls.