W. H. Auden:

The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island:
he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few
exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and
impressive, but more often the result is squalor--dirty sheets on the unmade
bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.


Ezra Pound:

Indeed _vers libre_ had become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid
varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual
language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the
excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete
the noise of a rhyme-sound.


T. S. Eliot:

No _vers_ is _libre_ for the man who wants to do a good job.