Abstract: Formal reconstruction was a common phenomenon in the early stage of the Third Republic of France and in Britain during the First World War when free verse passed its stage of formal liberation. Rather than differentiating free verse from prose, the deeper rationale of formal reconstruction is that free verse has been contaminated by the "mauvais sang (bad blood)" of aesthetic anarchism that satisfied the poets' craving for anti-formal poetry in the early stage. As anarchism did not fare very well under the press of political conservatism in the late 19th-century France and 1910s Britain, free verse, as a result, tried to clean away formal anarchism in order to obtain a unified definition. Because formal reconstruction still has a tendency of anarchism, and the unified conception fails to establish itself, formal reconstruction offers but another means of imagination of verse by which poets could soothe the trauma of a disrupted prosodic heritage.

Key words: imagination of verse, formal reconstruction, free verse, anarchism, new prosody