Eliot's poems manifest clever manipulation of a wide range of metric and rhyme patterns. Free verse does not mean freedom; on the contrary, it obliges poets to exercise full mastery over their materials and show orderliness through a fundamental discipline that may even incorporate apparent disorderliness. In Eliot's view, as far as form is concerned, what really matters in a poem is its total harmony and effect, which does not necessarily entail semantic totality and closure. For any poet who is conscious of the necessity of a logical relationship between form and content, free verse "does not exist", because "there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos". In his highly fragmentary poems, some passages are perfectly rhymed, some are prose-like, some are metrical, and some are conversational, but despite this apparent chaos, they all show a clear correlation with the overall thematic development.
)