Jerry,
I haven't yet read "Missing Measures" but I intend to do so asap. Sure, Pound's metronome comment could support Murphy's argument as you have paraphrased it, but I'm a little skeptical about a blanket statement that the Modernists tossed out Baby Meter with the Victorian bathwater. Stevens, Crane, Lindsay, and others wrote in meter, for one thing. Eliot penned complaints about vers-librists. I take the opinion that if blame is to be laid it should be on those that misread the intentions of the High Modernists. But I'm also not one to dismiss free verse as the corruption of the poetic medium.
As for simultaneous decline of influence of poetry in the public sphere and the rise of free verse practice, there might be a way in which it appears so in the United States. I have in front of me Douglas Dunn's interview in Fourteen on Form and he makes the point that poetry readings are enormously popular in Scotland; Susan Stewart points out in the introduction to the latest TriQuarterly that Italy continues to be a place of great interest in poetry readings (Roberto Benigni's recitation of Dante drew a record TV audience); and Kim Sowol's poems are widely recited in Korean classrooms. I don't know if such counterexamples are useful, or even convincing. I'm also not looking to offer a cure-all for poetry's woes, at least not today.
Best,
Doug
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