The conversation may be getting beyond me, but I'll offer a comment nonetheless.
The article's discussion of Whitman struck me as quite revealing and as, in effect, conceding all that I would claim about free verse. Namely, that there are rhythms, meters, cadences, etc., in free verse that give the verse music and complexity and order. The article nicely analyzes many of the ways that Whitman creates patterns and music. But the article certainly doesn't prove that Whitman's verse wasn't "free verse" after all, I'd say, but simply does a nice analysis of Whitman's free verse to account for its musical appeal.
Now it may be true that "the barbaric howls and yawps of his imitators only testify to their deafness to his often subtle music," but it's equally true that the crap produced by imitators of Shakespeare or Milton provides equal testimony to their deafness. If the point is that free verse must be as well written as formal verse, I don't think anyone ever claimed differently. No one ever claimed that "free verse" means never having to say you're sorry, or that writing "free verse" means that you never can be subject to a claim that your writing is boring or turgid or devoid of music.
BUT THE ESSENTIAL POINT that the article appears to overlook is that the patterns and the music and the cadences, etc., in Whitman's verse are patterns that are discovered after the poems were written. The point I was making in the other thread was that a free verse poem finds its order and structure in the composition, and in many ways is as ordered and structured and musical as formal poems, but that a free verse poem doesn't create its order by fulfilling a pre-existing formal template. Once a sucessful free verse poem is written, of course one may analyze its rhythms and the texture of its "feet", etc., to account for aspects of the poem's success, but none of the Whitman lines that are analyzed in the article necessarily had to have the number of syllables, feet, dactyls, etc., that they ended up having. Whitman was free to do otherwise and there were no rules by which he could check himself (i.e., I need a pentameter line that rhymes with line 7) other than his own sense of the music and order that appealed to him as appropriate to the poem's unfolding.
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