Not just Justice, but Richard Wilbur, whose first book is very influenced by Stevens. This poem, though, folks, is blank verse and not even very loose pentameter at that. Except for the last line, which follows a very old convention, conclude with a hexameter to give the closure weight. Lovely poem.
Frankly, to see this in the Free Verse forum reminds me of a story I heard from Dana Gioia. When he was doing his post-grad at Harvard one of his Professors lectured for an hour, explaining how "Speech After Long Silence" is one of the great examples of Yeats' free verse: (from memory)
Speech after long silence. It is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn against unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of art and song.
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom. Young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
Of course it's envelope Q's of pentameter, but the great Modernists are often wrongly enlisted in the cause of free verse.
|
Hybrid Mode
