Some thoughts from a now-defunct and mostly-Brit online poetry forum called Burgundy, circa 2002:
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Clive Simpson:
Only in America are free verse and formal verse so polarised, and so heavy with political significance. Free versers genuinely believe they are still at the cutting edge, despite the fact that those most establishment of figures - State Poets Laureate - almost all write vers libre. Formalists feel besieged, what with the freeversistas controlling the university programmes, the poetry presses and most of the magazines - hence (to my mind) the obsession with exactitude of form and the minutiae of prosody. Any deviance would leave a dent in the Golden Calf.
It's all a load of bollocks, of course. Over here, the free and the formal have co-existed for years and long may they continue to do so.
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MA Griffiths:
For me, it's all a bit reminiscent of the big debate between Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Gulliver's Travels.
Doesn't matter to me, so long as the egg is fresh....
Regards,Maz
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