Free Verse Poetry Trend in Nepal: A Critical Review of Form, Voice, Identity, and Contemporary Transformation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68148/q11a2012Keywords:
identity, modernity, rhythm, resistance, stylisticsAbstract
Background: Free verse has developed into a vital mode of modern and contemporary poetic expression in Nepal, although criticism has focused much more on individual poets, poems, themes, stylistic devices, and events than on the development of free verse as a literary trend.
Methods: This paper reviews the literature comprising the research articles bearing DOI and published from 2021 to 2025, paying particular attention to Nepali poetry, prose poetry, modernity, rhythm, identity, resistance, culture, and digital circulation of literature. Articles were searched using scholarly journal database and DOI and then were selected on the basis of their connection to the development and peculiarities of contemporary Nepali poetry.
Results: Literature shows that the free verse in Nepal cannot simply be defined as a lack of metrical organisation but can be seen as an adaptive poetic mode, where lineation, cadence, repetition, punctuation, imagery, syntactic variation, silences, and semantic accents produce rhythm. The literature also demonstrates the transition from formal modernist experiments to socially situated, diverse, feminist, indigenous, ecological, existential, and digitised poetic expressions. Prose poetry, like free verse, represents a kind of resistance to metrical poetic tradition, but these two poetic modes should not be confused with each other.
Conclusion: Free verse has proved to be resilient because it incorporates diverse Nepali experiences, and at the same time allows experimenting with form.
Novelty: This review combines the scattered literature that contains DOIs and provides a historically sensitive framework connecting formal flexibility with social diversity, identity politics, technological mediation, and novel literary trends in Nepal.
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