Brett, you're flat-out wrong. The mature poet has lived in the world, and he or she articulates his vision of that experience. But it's not as though some Divine Wind simply blows through the oracle. His tools are rhyme, meter, and all the other arrows from that ancient quiver I mentioned. In my jacket comment for Rhina Espaillat's forthcoming book I quoted her half line: "light carpentry in mid-air," which she uses to describe birds in their nest-building, but which I think is an apt metaphor for Rhina's enterprise, and for all of ours as well.
My first comment was uncharacteristically low-key, but I'll say again what I've said elsewhere on the Sphere. 98% of the great poetry that has come down to us over the last 4000 years is formal verse. Free verse is largely a failure, and it has devastated our audience and wasted the lives of many of my talented predecessors. Fine work is being done in form by scores of contemporary poets. We've not yet produced a Robert Frost, but then America has produced only one of him in its 225 years.
So free versers, have at it. I like the four millenia of odds that favor form in every language known to the human race.
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