Alexandrine introduce phrasal accentuation, or rigorously observe the medial caesura, as in French." Common usage within the literatures of European languages is broader still, embracing lines syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and (inevitably) stationed ambivalently between the two; lines of 12, 13, or even 14 syllables; lines with obligatory, predominant, and optional caesurae. Although alexandrines occurred in French verse as early as the 12th century, they were slightly looser rhythmically, and vied with the "décasyllabe" and "octosyllabe" for cultural prominence and use in various genres. "The alexandrine came into its own in the middle of the sixteenth century with the poets of the Pléiade
Free verse poets such as Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue in his "Derniers vers" of 1890. Taupin, the US-based French poet and critic, concluded that free verse and "vers libre" are not synonymous, since "the French language tends to give equal weight to each spoken syllable, whereas English syllables vary in quantity according to whether stressed or unstressed." The sort of cadencing that we now recognize in free verse can be traced back at least as far as the Biblical Hebrew psalmist poetry of the Bible. By referring to the , it is possible to argue that free verse in English first