Both meter and rhyme have gone out of fashion in English language poetry. A poet submitting poems in formal verse to almost any editor in the U.S. or the U.K. will get a rejection letter and sometimes a note recommending the use of less traditional structures. Free verse reigns absolutely supreme. The evolution of style is not sufficient to account for such an extreme rejection of meter and rhyme. After all, something can be passé and still perfectly acceptable - within my own lifetime, I've witnessed leg warmers become cool and uncool more than once - but the case of poetry is different.
The intensely close-minded attitude towards poetry written in any regular metrical structure, whether blank verse or rhymed, is indicative of the deep-rooted infection of progressivism. This model of human progress, clung to so tenaciously across so many sectors of English language culture, presumes that the progression of time marks constant, steady improvement. A progressivist believes that every generation gets stronger, sturdier, smarter, and more capable. This ideology permits us to feel self-righteous contempt towards those who came before us and assume that we always know better. It insists that all new insights are somehow more advanced than old ones, that new views, political or otherwise, are somehow more correct. This is why one speaks of 'progressive' and 'retrogressive' ideas. But it's a slippery ideology, since, despite the listing of facts to argue for its veracity, how can we define 'better'? For instance, a longer lifetime is often pointed to as an argument for progressivism, but such an argument fails to examine why a longer life is better than a shorter one, and what those additional years are like qualitatively.
In the realm of poetry, progressivist ideology dictates that older forms, themes, and styles are superseded by new ones, to be eclipsed forever or revived only in specific (and often ironic) instances. As a result, free verse is presumed to be 'better' than metrical verse, a judgement so extremely superficial that it's almost laughable without the pressing weight of ideology behind it. Even a very great genius, writing in the style of Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Baudelaire, or Browning, is sure to get the stinkeye. Underlying this attitude is a skittish rejection of anything that smacks of elitism, even though few literary worlds are as constricted and difficult to access as that of poetry. Many people will argue that those formal structures were invented, utilized, and celebrated by rich (at least, sometimes) white men, which, although true if very generalized, ignores every woman poet from Aphra Behn to Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Emily Dickinson, who not only wrote poetry in metrical forms, but also significantly innovated those forms. That attitude also simultaneously and tacitly excises poetry from the non-western world for consideration. The argument evacuates itself by ignoring the very poets - women and men and women of color - it claims to champion.
It's also been argued that free verse is more accessible for readers, though why that should be the case, given the preponderance of rhyme in, say, pop music, is unclear. Rather, it seems that free verse is supposed to be more accessible for the poets. With its total flexibility of structure, free verse appears at first glance to be easier to write than metered verse, but this is a fallacy. It is certainly easier to plop down a bunch of words with line breaks and call it poetry than to write a technically flawless sonnet, but this equates a bunch of words with poetry - and poetry wouldn't exist if that were so. In fact, I would argue that it is far harder to write free verse than metrical verse because writing in meter forces a greater consideration of the economy of word usage. If one only has five metrical feet to work with, the poet must consider every tiny syllable, every punctuation mark, and thus a first draft is born with - by necessity - a tighter construction and more thought-through vocabulary. Free verse, on the other hand, requires far greater discipline of the poet: the free verse poet has to have a much more acute ear, sensitive to subtle nuances of rhythm, and a more exacting eye, attentive to the precise shapes of lines upon a page.
I don't argue for a see-saw shift in stylistic convention, but surely we could be a tad more open-minded, and allow the poets of our own age the freedom that we claim to desire so deeply in a political sense through the choices of their own structures and forms, whether that be a Petrarchan sonnet or a rap-inflected riff. Why do we have to choose? How much richer would our poetry be if there was cultural tolerance for all structures and forms, instead of only a tiny, ideologically compromised fraction?
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