But surely Wilbur didn't mean that a poet ought to make use of every tool in every poem he writes. There are fine poems, of course, that don't make any noteworthy use of alliteration, for example. By the same token, I would say that a given poem that doesn't make prominent use of meter or rhyme might fit Wilbur's statement just as much as a poem that doesn't make prominent use of alliteration or enjambment or trochaic substitutions.
I'm wondering, by the way, why the psalms' success at being great free verse poems doesn't show that free verse is a valid way of constructing a great poem. It may possibly harder to write a "great" free verse poem than a great metrical one, but that's an argument in favor of formal verse as being easier, not superior. Should no poet ever aspire to write something like a psalm?
As a practical matter, as well, since most of us can frankly not hope to produce that many "great" poems, but only excellent or very good poems, the relevant comparison would be how hard it is to write a good (not great) poem in free verse or formal verse. I sort of agree that there aren't that many toweringly great free verse poems (though I'd allow more than Mezey does), but it seems to me that the lower echelons give us as many "very good" free verse poems as "very good" metrical poems.
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