In Western culture in the 19th Century verse writing peaked as a popular way to pass the time, not just for poets or aspiring poets, but for people in their day to day lives, and it was used with versalitity. People even wrote verse because it was easier for them than to compose whole paragraphs of prose. In cultures where people often sing the metrics and the rhyme in poetry come easily. And that was the case throughout Western culture until the 20th Century took hold. Poetry writing as a common practice continued to flourish in pockets of culture where singing also flourished, such as many parts of the American South.
Those days are long gone. Metrics hold an association in the mind with a bygone time that many people feel should be restored. But the reality is that free verse began in the same Victorian era, in the middle of the 19th Century because versalitity in poetry flourished then.
Free verse parallels in use, influence, and necessity, free indirect discourse in fiction. Free verse should more accurately be called free indirect verse because what's free is the discourse in the poem. Leaves of Grass has the equivalent role in poetry to Madame Bovary in fiction. This is not going to be undone. Free verse does not require the poetic equivalent of stream of consciousness or poetic dadaism or anything highly experimental.
The fact that everyone who writes at all right now has to live with is that the literary arts are shrinking in influence and use in Western culture, without any sign of a reversal.
Metricists who are serious about aspiring to write very good poetry, that's when metrics become formalism, are competing for a shrinking pool of crumbs left from the poetic pie with the poets who are continuing to take the greater risks with free indirect verse. I think the competition gets strange when Western metricists and Western free verse poets are competing over haiku.
There's probably nothing stranger going on in Western poetry than metricists and free verse poets competing over the definition of haiku; which has no discourse, no narrative, no rhyme, no mythology, no meter, no cadence; in Western terms.
[This message has been edited by albert geiser (edited April 18, 2005).]
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