I’ve been reading Steele’s ‘Missing Measures’, and I’m intrigued by his comments on why modernists eschewed meter and began writing in vers libre.
I can actually agree with some of their original goals: to use diction of the times, as opposed to the prevalent stilted Victorian idioms, and to write about events of everyday living. Apparently, however, diction became erroneously confused with meter - meter became blamed for the stilted Victorian writing. Eliminate meter, the thought process went, and the idiomatic problems would disappear. Eliminate meter, and another system would eventually evolve to replace it.
Meter, however, has nothing to do with diction or idioms. The first poet to come to mind as I read this was Tim Murphy – I think his writings achieve the original goals set by the likes of Eliot, yet they are undeniably metrical. Annie Finch also comes to mind.
As for something else coming along to replace meter – it hasn’t happened. Poets still talk about the rhythm of a poem, but all rhythm has an underlying beat, or else it’s chaotic.
For all their idealistic goals, I think those attacks on meter started a trend that, over the next hundred years, destroyed the importance of poetry as an art form form: for all their thoughts of writing to the common person, vers libre devolved to free verse, and the common person no longer understood it. It became more important, perhaps, for each writer to be ‘free and unique’, than for them write something the common person could understand and appreciate. Anything became a poem, merely because the person writing it claimed it was so.
An interesting book – I haven’t finished it yet, but, so far, it appears to be a book worth reading by all poets, whether metrical or not.
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