[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Formal poetry does not need vindication Ross

[ross hamilton hill]

I was referring to A. D. Hope not 'formal poetry'. Have you read his essay on free verse, it is available on line, search 'A.D.Hope essays" it is a disgraceful deceptive essay by a man obviously frightened by modern poetry and reacting against it. It so angered me that a professor of english could use such deceptive tactics such as deliberately publishing Eliot and Whitman without using correct line endings and manipulating the text to make his points.. I was disgusted and lost a lot of respect for Hope. I first read Hope 50 years ago and found him wooden and academic, he didn't speak to me. No doubt he wrote some fine work and was and is much loved but when he tried to discredit Eliot and Whitman by deceitful means he lost my vote. And if you don't believe me I will be happy to post his essay and tear it to bits. He didn't to my knowledge ever retract it or apologise for his deceit.

[Don Jones]

Ross,

I would love to read that essay and your profanation of it. If there is anything I hate more than a stuffy moralist it's a stuffy metrist!

[ross hamilton hill]

I was ranting a bit but I was a teacher and librarian at Universities and various colleges so I really was angered by Hope's essay. I have actually read a few of his poems and I can see he was a wonderful poet and an extraordinary man. But I hate people who are either or when in comes to poetry, it seems one-eyed not to see the value of free verse or too think formal verse is no longer valid.

[Gregory Dowling]

I think hating people who are either/or is a little excessive. Hope didn't like free verse and put his views in writing, as was only natural for a scholar and poet. Maybe he overstated things - and perhaps he misquoted to make his point, which is clearly less forgivable. And I know he said somewhere (I can't find it at the moment) that the title of his essay ("Free Verse: a Post-Mortem") had proved a little premature. But given the range of his true accomplishments I'd say we don't need to be too bothered by this blind spot of his. Tolstoy, after all, couldn't understand Shakespeare. Eliot dismissed Byron. And so it goes...

[ross hamilton hill]

'Perhaps' Greg, have your read the essay. As I said it's online. but you're right, I of course don't hate the people just the intellectual position. Did I mention the first person to encourage me to write poetry was Douglas Stewart, he was poetry editor at the same publishers where I was junior editor. Just name dropping!!
cheers
Ross

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, if you're referring to the essay included in The Cave and the Spring. I read it a while ago and I've just checked it out again. I suppose you could say he misquotes, in that he re-arranges the line-breaks in "Ash Wednesday" in order to question their sheer arbitrariness (as he sees it). But he does warn you that that is what he is doing. I can't find him doing the same thing to Whitman, although he does talk about him (whom he clearly prefers to Eliot - or, at least, dislikes less), but maybe that's in another essay.

It's certainly a questionable essay - and it probably helped to make Hope deeply unfashionable - but it has a certain coherence of its own. It helps you understand why he wrote the kind of poetry he did.

A good name to drop, Ross.