Free verse is mostly a joke

Free verse is mostly a joke.

All of those who possess good taste know it.

I shall be a formalist until the end.

Good free verse poem, 8/10

Whitman is the exception

Whitman and the whitmanians - Pessoa, Neruda - and for two reasons:

1) they grew up reading metrified verse and actually knew how to write it - in Pessoa's case, he even wrote some of the most metrically rigorous poems in the history of his language;

and 2) they knew how to use other effects to give their poems a musical quality - catalogues, anaphoras, and so on.

Those were the first generations of free-verse writers. They knew their measures and they knew how to break them. Most contemporary poets do not, and the result is unreadable trash. Even those who do can sometimes be very bad indeed.

Another problem, which also arrived with modernism, is the fascination for the utterly unfascinating.

I take the Williams wheelbarrow poem as good example of this:

''so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.''

I eliminated the line breaks because they don't actually have a reason to be there.

What is the interest to be found in that poem? None at all.

In the old days, all subject matters of little interest would be made interesting by means of metrical constructions. Nowadays, with the tirany of free verse, they all become absolutely banal.

The idea that presentation is enough, which is present, for instance, in the credo of the imagists, is another pernicious lie. The best American poet of the 20th century was, by far and wide, Robert Frost, and he managed to get interest out of dead things - a pile of wood, a bunch of flowers in a canoe, a bird - precisely by means of intellectual elaboration upon the object (all written in perfectly good meter, of course).

Modernism has become the canker of the old flower of poetry.

''free verse is
mostly a joke and

all of those
who possess good taste and memory
for the old red white and blue
of longfellow & co.
know it well and

that's why
i
shall be a formalist
until the end''

There it is. Weird line breaks, political associations, random mentions concerning the 'tradition', and all the crap those idiots want.

Now find someone to write a thesis about it and shove it up their ass. If you go to a university campus I think you won't have any difficulty. I bet I could probably get it published somewhere.

I agreed with you up til you praised Frost. I like him but Ezra Pound has him beat as far as Americans go and Yeats is the best of the modernists (though he admittedly sometimes lacks musicality)

Justify this.
Whitman is trash.

I used to love Pound, but I've been disliking him more and more. I can't help but laugh at some of his views on poetry. He believed in progress.

Yeats was superior to Frost, indeed.

And then there was Eliot, who wrote 'La Figlia Che Piange' - my favorite modernist poem.

Best American poets of all time:

1. Edward Taylor;
2. Emily Dickinson;
3. Edgar Poe;
4. Robert Frost;
5. Longfellow.

Prove me wrong.

Bloom said Whitman was good so you're wrong

nice free verse poem OP

Free verse can be very good, it just allows a lot of garbage to get by unchecked.

>I eliminated the line breaks because they don't actually have a reason to be there.

yes they do. they give the poem a sense of pace. it is a slow introduction of images and ideas, so you are purposely limited in how you approach the poem, using only what is available to you at a given time so that you can try to construct a world in your mind in which the information could be true. it's a way of leveraging the mechanics of poetry more simply, more essential to the poem itself, without reference to outside allusions or allegories. you know what a red wheelbarrow looks like, and white chickens, and something being glazed with rainwater. it also puts emphasis on barrow and water being separate while simultaneously being modified by the compound word to which they belong

I have to admit I don't know that much about Frost so I'm Woefully ill-equipped to speak on him. But yeah it can be hard to like Pound and it's easy to call him try-hard but I find him admirable because he tried so hard (though his successes can seem sparse and far between)

Free Verse is good.

I agree, but most attention-whoring social media "poets" would still be total shit even if meter and rhyme schemes were fashionable. The democratization of culture that came with the internet has just been an all-around cancer to the arts because every tasteless pedestrian faggot thinks their opinions are valid.

They would at least have the benefits of form.

Form has a pleasure of it's own. When they are written in rigorous, no-silly-excuses rhymed meter, most sonnets you read can give you at least some, if very small, pleasure. It's like painting: if the artist has learned the basic techniques, then his works will be at least a little enjoyable (this is what explains, for instance, the fact that Hitler's drawings are enjoyed by people on the internet, even thought there is nothing particularly exceptional about them). Writing a sonnet or a sestina means that, at the very least, you know the rules and are good enough to follow them.

>Most contemporary poets do not, and the result is unreadable trash.
Most poetry was trash when it was all in meter too.

There is a very important difference between readeable trash and unreadable trash.

Not really.

Whatever. The fact is that the most prominent contemporary poets of today are very much inferior to the greatest poets from the time of Keats, Donne, or, in America, Dickinson, and Longfellow.

>They would at least have the benefits of form
I wanted to be a poet for years and now that I'm done with it - trust me - that's not true. If you suck, you suck

haha, do you expect people to believe you?

Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth.

Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Marvell, Milton.

Name five poets from the last 50 years who can compare.

Geoffrey Hill was pretty much the only one.