Go read Jonathan Mayhew's blog entry here and his comment here, then come back. (Thanks, Kasey, for that tactic.)
I'm also struck by the fact that he and I write almost the same words about meter and rhythm, but hear so differently the work of contemporary poets using traditional meter. I think it's significant that we also hear Donne very differently, and that Jonathan hears Donne the way the early modernists heard him, which is something like the obverse of the way he was heard in the 18th century--as a deliberate rather than a careless flaunter of metrical convention--and that both Eliot and Pope were wrong. Donne's syntax is often difficult, and his tropes violent, but his meter is usually very regular. He does occasionally begin a line of IP with two trochees, which, as far as I remember, never happens in Dryden or Pope (or Shakespeare, despite Sonnet 116), but it's the Satires that really exercised his 18th century readers. Those are the pieces that Pope "improved," and they aren't IP at all. Despite their ten syllables (with conventional elision) and rhyming couplets, they're pure syllabics. 18th century readers, however, attuned to Augustan versification, read them as failed IP (though Thomas Gray got it right) just as the early modernists, attuned to the late Victorians, read them as an adventurous departure from IP.
It is astonishing to hear recordings of Tennyson and Yeats reading their poetry and pounding out their meters. (Are there any recordings of Hardy?) It's no wonder Pound, who worked as a secretary to Yeats, spoke of metronomes; it's nearly impossible to read any of Donne in that manner. I think there was a metrical crisis at the turn of the last century, though Eliot and Pound and Williams misunderstood it, and to them Donne must have sounded just like revolution. Jonathan writes "I like Frost and Hardy. The ideological use to which such poets are put, though, is another matter. As in, 'Let's write like Thomas Hardy so we can forget that modernism ever existed.'" That's a curious pair, since Frost lived through modernism. He didn't write as if modernism never happened; he knew that about meter, Eliot and Pound were mistaken.
I promise I will have something to say about Kasey's complaint that contemporary formalism features "a simultaneously maudlin and journalistic insistence on narrating some wise, poignant, sober ... well, "'truth.'" But maybe not till the weekend. Musical gigs coming up, and it's warm enough to ride my bicycle to work, so I need to get up earlier. And I need to write poems!
Update
Jonathan quoted me accurately here. I changed the sentence, partly because of his quote. But regarding Hecht's attiude towards free verse, see this account on Kasey Mohammad's blog of a New York Times article from January 21. I'd have linked the Times piece, but it costs money to see their archives. Kasey's summary is accurate, if, um, not entirely friendly.
10:51:07 PM 
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