Chris: two fascinating posts from you. I am not sure how to answer the questions you raise. The only point I was trying to make is that why we love certain poets--or hate them--is a personal quirk. Some people love meter. Others would rather have major dental surgery without anaesthesia than be subjected to it. I feel the same way about Tennyson. You can read him to me until you are blue in the face and all I will want to do is smack Tennyson around with a large, hardbound thesaurus. I know it's completely irrational, but so is a good deal of love (and hate), and all the arguing in the world is not going to change my opinion. Well, at least on Tennyson.
OK, many people on here don't consider the red wheelbarrow poem a "real" poem. It is, admittedly, a curio. But the argument doesn't stop there--it is extended to ALL free verse. And I don't know how condemning ALL free verse is going to make someone who loves it say, "Oh my God, how blind I have been all these years. Free verse IS shit. Let me rush out right now and buy the collected works of Frost, Pope and Lord Byron." Wouldn't it be better to show people how much fun you can have with meter and rhyme, how playful it can be? It's like reading Chaucer in Middle English--the jokes are MUCH better.
I realize I am the cheese who stands alone on this one. Haven't you noticed that the people who write free verse on these boards--presumably the very ones people who love metrical, syllabic, accentual verse want to "win over"--NEVER participate in these discussions? I sure have. And I wonder if that is because they don't particularly want to hear things like, to take one example, "Verse (that boring old shit that should have gone away) focuses the human sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable content of human speech. It revels in sound and play and charged language." I am sure people who write free verse expend as much effort, have as much fun with sounds and textures, as your most dedicated sonneteer. And not that I mean to pick on Len--I think a good deal of what he says has tremendous validity. It's just that this war between free v formal is so voraciously energy-consuming. And if one side "wins," who loses?