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On Poetry
A friend pointed me to Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Today in 1788, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born. In 1948, the poet Timothy Steele was born. These two things are barely related, since Byron is one of the great poets and Steele is, well, who is Steele anyway? I'm not expert on modern poetry, but I do teach English and there are many modern poets I would recognize, and I'd never heard of him until now. Yet, I found something interesting about him:
He is an advocate of metrical poetry, as opposed to free verse. He said, "I believe that our ability to organize thought and speech into measure is one of the most precious endowments of the human race." And he said, "The original free-versers hoped their revolution would lead to a new metrical system. They did not want their efforts to result in poetry's degenerating into lineated prose, which is sort of what's happened."
Timothy Steele teaches at California State University Los Angeles. He wrote: "Form gives you a way not only of expressing things, but also of understanding them. The medium makes you look at phrasing and thought from different angles and almost inevitably leads you to think about elements of this or that experience or subject in ways you would not have otherwise."
Now, just a quick read through his poetry didn't make me a fan, but I can respect where he's coming from, especially given the close proximity here to the free-form "poem" from Obama's inauguration. To be honest, I'd have a hard time saying which was more "poetic," the invocation, the benediction, the inaugural address, or the poem itself. Each had a poetic element to it and each was rather prosaic as well.
Don't get me wrong: free verse can be very powerful stuff, and it's very easy for metrical, rhymed poetry to sound trite, but too often modern poetry loses so much of what gives poetry its power, becoming instead just short (or, sadly, sometimes not short enough), pretentious prose works. Metrical verse, especially when rhymed, is demanding to write, much less to write well, but the payoff is something powerful, something unavailable to mere prose.
I guess when it comes down to it, I certainly wouldn't do away with free verse, because good things are being done there. However, metrical, rhymed poetry should not be dismissed out of hand as an inferior, out-dated mode of poetry. We have a love-affair with "new and improved," and so there's a sense among many poets and scholars especially that we can't go back. On the contrary, poets probably should have a good reason in mind to abandon these traditional forms of poetry.