Frost wrote poems in verse forms reminiscent of his nineteenth century predecessors, while his contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens experimented with unconventional forms and structures known as free verse. Frost was not impressed with free verse, also known as
vers libre, which was written without adherence to any metric frame. Rather, he chose to use conventional techniques such as meter, line length, and rhyme scheme to create an unconventional and completely modern effect.
Frost's primary contribution to modern poetic technique is his masterful uniting of iambic meter with the freedom of the spoken voice. Using vivid imagery, Frost describes ordinary rural activity and muses upon the mysteries of life in a simple, accessible language. His finely crafted poems exhibit his command of form and rhythm and his remarkable ability to create the distinct sound of New England speech patterns. He termed this quality "the sounds of sense" or "sentence sounds." Throughout his writing career, Frost experimented with his style of setting traditional meters with natural rhythms of speech. He wrote in a variety of traditional forms, including blank verse, sonnets, lyrics, and a type of dramatic verse known as masques.
