A book I am currently reading, "The Flexible Lyric" by Ellen Bryant Voigt is not for the beginner and rather dry in some places, but she makes a lot of good points.
Such as;
…My own resistance to their [ Neo-formalists] program (which is no doubt more heterogeneous than advertised) is twofold: that "formal means" is narrowly defined, and that so few of their members have Richard Wilbur's ear. Poems of contemporary voice merely willed into quantifiable verse, with unvaried, arrhythmic meter or predictable rhyme, seem as static, as inert, as discarded mollusk shells—although the same may be said of many free verse slugs as well."
I like that she stresses that both forms should be approached with an awareness of the need for craftsmanship as well as content.
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