I'm also not a huge fan of free verse. And I love Milton. But I have to confess I prefer a lot of moderns to the metronomic iambs of the 18th century. Wallace Stevens did things with his obscure language that seemed to be both beautiful and strange, to capture the weirdness and isolation of modernity without becoming solipsistic. Elizabeth Bishop in her beautiful (and often metrical!) poems explored themes, like the lostness of permanent travel, that frankly I find more intrinsically compelling than the stock religious tropes of pre-Romantic poetry (despite being religious myself). And T.S. Eliot wrought titanic meaning and beauty out of the blasted lunar surface of post-WWI civilization, if you can call it that.
So I agree that it's time to reclaim meter. We need it as a medium for carrying ideas and meaning across the isolated membranes of individual modern minds. For an art form to have *public* function, it needs conventional idioms. But the explosion of creative ferment that accompanied the cultural breakdown of modernity left us with some dazzling literary gifts. A future poetics should treat the modern break like a tree treats a scar: growing a burl around it, incorporating it forever into the trunk, making it into something permanent and beautiful.
I'm also not a huge fan of free verse. And I love Milton. But I have to confess I prefer a lot of moderns to the metronomic iambs of the 18th century. Wallace Stevens did things with his obscure language that seemed to be both beautiful and strange, to capture the weirdness and isolation of modernity without becoming solipsistic. Elizabeth Bishop in her beautiful (and often metrical!) poems explored themes, like the lostness of permanent travel, that frankly I find more intrinsically compelling than the stock religious tropes of pre-Romantic poetry (despite being religious myself). And T.S. Eliot wrought titanic meaning and beauty out of the blasted lunar surface of post-WWI civilization, if you can call it that.
So I agree that it's time to reclaim meter. We need it as a medium for carrying ideas and meaning across the isolated membranes of individual modern minds. For an art form to have *public* function, it needs conventional idioms. But the explosion of creative ferment that accompanied the cultural breakdown of modernity left us with some dazzling literary gifts. A future poetics should treat the modern break like a tree treats a scar: growing a burl around it, incorporating it forever into the trunk, making it into something permanent and beautiful.
I don't disagree
Free verse has almost always left me cold too, despite having written my fair share of it! https://geekorthodox.substack.com/p/my-thoughts-in-poetry-on-free-verse