[Christopher ONeill]

I don't see any particular flaw in Hulme's line of argument. I wouldn't expect to: the guy wrote The Embankment. Poets that good seldom drop major catches.

But I think you could read Hulme's main argument as being: 'The big issue with verse poetry is that currently everybody is doing it, and nobody really has a particularly good reason why. (Most of Hulme's essay doesn't so much argue in favour of freeverse, as point out that most of the arguments being used against it in 1908 were tired or irrelevant or incoherent).

In the present poetic climate in most of America (and quite a bit of the UK) everybody is doing freeverse, and very few people have any particularly good reason why anymore. Strictform is preachy? Robinson Jeffers managed to be preachy and formless both at the same time. Rime encourages bad word choices? (I'm sure you can find your own counterexample for that). Strictform is old-hat? Most English poetry has been in some kind of freeverse for at least the last two generations.

When an artist like Michael Cantor (or Geoffrey Hill) uses strictform, it is often as a misdirection stratagem. While the ear is listening for the next rime, or the steady beat of metre, it has less attention to watch carefully what the words are doing. (I think Michael's last post on Metrical is an example of such a trick poem, though not everyone will agree with me).

Perhaps regular form is the natural ally of poets who want to examine how language might be used seductively or dishonestly. Advertisers are fond of jingles; politicians are fond of artfully crafted rhetorical language which produces memorable soundbites. Poets are able to challenge the validity of thinking in jingles - mainly by writing poems which might sound like jingles, but are not. Poets are also able to take language games away from the politicians (E E Cummings Next to God America I). For both operations, regular metres are a natural implement (though clearly not mandatory).

Perhaps regular form is only favoured for conjuror poems (would it be possible to rewrite the magical limerick 'There was a young lady from Bude' in freeform?). But then, you only need to demonstrate that there is one thing that works much better in regular form (we both know that there are many more benefits to regular form, but you won't be preaching to the choir at Celtfest). Once folk begin to understand that regular verse does some things better, they can take their time at discovering just how many.

I don't remember the precise quote (I'm sure it is Googleable) but Ezra Pound said something about wanting to 'compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome'. Some years later, in the Cantos, he expanded this to:

to break the pentameter, that was the first heave

Ezra was probably right about there being something fundamentally non-iambic about natural American speech rhythms (Longfellow, Whitman, and Poe are all notably thin on the iamb); but you notice that Ezra says twice what he is not going to do. He never quite says what he is going to do.

I think a lot of the current lostness of English (both Brit and American) prosody gets back eventually to the Modernists knowing what they were reacting against, but being much weaker on working out what their goals were. There are many good reasons for leaving New York City (going to Munich perhaps); but if the only idea in your head is 'Must leave New York City' - who knows where you are going to end up?

This is a bit rambly, but then - it is difficult to attack fog. And I think fog is the only real name for what Language Poets, or Black Mountain Poets, or the Poets of the New Albion have to say about their notions of prosodics.

Being a formalist, or a neo-formalist, might leave your ideas open to attack; but at least it obliges you to have ideas.

There were certainly good reasons for reacting against regular metres in 1908, there probably still are (some of the time). But going along with any particular mindset (formal or anti-formal) simply because it is what everybody thinks - isn't what poets do.

T E Hulme was against form in 1908. The same line of argument might easily have made him an exponent of form in 2008. Times change.