Philosophical Implications In Poetry
From the poet Robert Hass, discussing the difference between metered poetry and free verse:
"The difference is, in some ways, huge; the metrical poem begins with an assumption of human life which takes place in a pattern of orderly recurrence with which the poet must come to terms, the free verse poem with an assumption of openness or chaos in which an order must be discovered."
posted by Bobby @ 5:44 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Very interesting. I will link to your post here sometime in the next two weeks when I finally getting around to posting an excerpt from a GK Chesterton book. It ties in nicely.
And for the record, my sympathies are with those who write metered poetry. The skill it takes to write a metrical poem without making it seem choppy is something I envy.
Thanks!
I do love many free verse poems, and I admire those who are good at it because, although it's easier to do it, it's harder to do it well.
But, like you, I favor metered poetry. And too often when I read free verse, I get the feeling that Frost was correct when he likened writing free verse to "playing tennis with the net down."
Oh, it's so true! I mean, I do think that writing any form of poetry is difficult (or at least, difficult to do well), and I like any poem that's well-written even if free verse, but free verse is a little bit like cheating.
Ok, not to take over your blog, but now I have to relay this conversation I once had, because it's very much like an "in" joke for poets. Some friends were talking about poetry once, and I said that I while I think he was gifted I didn't like TS Eliot all that much, and this one guy got kind of offended and said, "oh, what do you like, Robert Frost?" Which at the time I thought was just hilarious. I don't know why. And now when I tell that story, no one laughs, but I tell it anyway.
But I DO like Robert Frost!
Yeah I think for awhile there was this academic backlash against Frost because he was the "popular" or even "commercial" poet back in the day, but the Ivory Tower folk are, and will continue, to come around to the fact that his poems found wide appeal because they were great.
I'm impressed with people who are able to write metrical poetry. That is not one of my talents. I remember in highschool English I had a couple assignments in which I was suppose to do that. Never could quite figure it out.
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