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.