John,
I'm not sure to whom or what your post is directed at. I don't think anyone here is lashing out at free verse or the last 150 years of poetry. My only qualm about free verse is that much was sacrificed for that freedom, and not always for the better. Meter (and rhyme) satisfy fundamental human desires for patterns, both for meaning and for the sheer pleasure. Free verse kind still utilize other patterns, but most will not be as intuitively discernible as meter and rhyme. I don't think any poet "killed" anything; poetry just evolved/changed as all art forms do, and we can sit around and debate whether that change was for the better or not, but I'd rather just appreciate what's out there and ignore the rest. This thread was mostly concerned about the relationship between meter and natural speech; it wasn't intended as any kind of commentary (positive or negative) on the the evolution of poetry in the last 150 years.
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