[John Beaton]

I'm conducting a repeat "Be a Bard" workshop this year at an event called "Celtfest", and one of its premises is that metrical poetry has a place in the modern world and is reviving.

I've been kicking the tires of that premise because, while I have lots of examples of some resurgence, I keep running into poetry people and publications, particularly in Canada, who have a strong and immediate aversion to anything rhymed and metered. To give an example, I was in a workshop recently and a participant suggested that a word in one of my poems was not well-chosen. She added, "You see, that's what rhyme does to you."

I can surmise some obvious reasons for this aversion--rhymes get tired, form is constraining, and there's a lot of bad metrical poetry in the world. (I think this Canadian poet didn't help.) However, there's a lot fresh metrical poetry and a lot of bad free verse too. I keep returning to what I see as a disconnect between the supply and demand for poetry among the general public, as exemplified by the BBC's 1995 poll of 12,000 book-program listeners. In the top 100 of the audience's favorite poems, ranked by popularity, you have to go to 22nd place to find the first free verse poem. Yet the proportion of published poetry that is metrical is very low in comparison to free verse.

I'm therefore digging a bit to better understand how, during the rise of free verse, metrical poetry, instead of happily coexisting with its new companion, fell into decline. I found this 1908 lecture, to which Wikipedia refers as "a concise statement of Hulme's influential advocacy of free verse", both well-written and revealing. Now I'd like to examine whether his reasoning is flawed and, if so, where those flaws lie.

Apart from my own reading and general schooling, I've had no academic education in poetry, so I'd be interested in hearing of other influential expositions of why metrical poetry is thought by some to be passé.

John