I'll weigh in briefly, since Tim asked me to. I
think almost everything Alicia said is right on.
I did go in for free verse in the mid-60s, lock
stock and barrel, and though I think I write
decent free verse, I don't feel that my ear for
it is nearly as good as my ear for metrical verse.
There is indeed a deep division among many poets
about the virtues, even the permissibility, of
these modes, but it's an absurd argument. Any
competent poet ought to be able to recognize good
verse, whether free or otherwise; as Alicia said,
that's the only criterion that matters. (Which
reminds me of Eliot's famous remark, "No verse is
free for the man who wants to do a good job.")
Surely no sensible person would wish that To
Elsie or Dedication for a Plot of Ground
had been written in metrical verse. And there are
other very beautiful poems in free verse. But,
and most young poets don't seem to realize this,
free verse is much more difficult than writing in
the meters. As Wilbur says, in choosing free verse,
you immediately give up most of a poet's tools and
resources. There's is nothing wrong with free verse
per se, but that it has become the standard "form"
in our time is an unmitigated disaster and is one of
the reasons that most contemporary verse in America,
and, I suspect, everywhere else, is complete junk.
I think it was Rexroth who said that if you write
free verse, you're standing out there all alone and
absolutely naked and you'd better have something
really fresh and important to say and powerful ways
to say etc etc---he didn't follow his own advice
and almost of all his free verse, that is, almost
all of his poetry is pretty bad. And Pound (who
also didn't follow his own advice) said that one
should never abandon the meters unless the poem
simply seems to demands a different sort of sound,
some delicate rhythms not available to free verse---
he said something like that. But the meters are
capable of much more delicacy and subtlety of rhythm
than free verse. One very big problem is that except
in the hands of a master, most free verse sounds like
all other free verse. If you read Frost and Hardy,
any good poet for that matter, although the poems are
all in meter, one doesn't sound like another, even if
it's in the same meter. Every poem has its own
sound. That is certainly not the case with Whitman.
Or, much of the time, with Williams, though he had a
better ear. Well, enough. One goes on saying these
things over and over and the poets who don't and won't
and can't write in meter keep saying dumb things like,
Form is dead, and so on and so forth. You can't make
them understand and it's a waste of breath to try.
All you can do (and it too won't work) is to remind
them that Borges, one of the greatest writers ever,
said many times that poets are free to write whatever
they want, but that they shouldn't presume to write
in a mode so difficult as free verse until they've
demonstrated that they are poets, that they know the
poet's craft. The reason so many poets are hostile
to metrical verse is that they know, at some level,
that if that were the norm (as it should be for
free verse to mean anything), they would have to look
for another job. Selah.
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