There's a lot of excellent 20th century metrical poetry by people who are definitely not part of Official Verse Culture. I've already pointed out Send Bygraves, by the mystery writer Martha Grimes, and from time to time I'll share other finds with you—and please return the favor. When I was a C. S. Lewis fanatic (I still think his book on allegory is the best that's been done) I came across Charles Williams's Taliessin through Logres (out of print but obtainable) one of the strangest books of poetry I know. After 30 years it continues to surprise and delight me, and this is one of its strangest and most beautiful poems:
Taliessin's Song of the Unicorn
Shouldering shapes of the skies of Broceliande
are rumours in the flesh of Caucasia; they raid the west;
clattering with shining hooves, in myth scanned—
centaur, gryphon, but lordlier for verse is the crest
of the unicorn, the quick panting unicorn; he will come
to a girl's crooked finger or the sharp smell
of her clear flesh—but to her no good; the strum
of her blood takes no riot or quiet from the quell;
she cannot like such a snorting love
galloped from a dusky horizon it has no voice
to explain, nor the silver horn pirouetting above
her bosom—a ghostly threat but no way to rejoice
in released satiation; her body without delight
chill-curdled, and the gruesome horn only to be
polished, its rifling rubbed between breasts; right
is the tale that a true man runs and sets the maid free,
and she lies with the gay hunter and his spear flesh-hued,
and over their couch the spoiled head displayed—
as Lesbia tied horned Catullus—of the cuckold of the wood;
such, west from Caucasia, is the will of every maid;
yet if any, having the cunning to call the great beast,
the animal which is but a shade until it starts to run,
should dare set palms on the point, twisting from the least
to feel the sharper impress, for the thrust to stun
her arteries into channels of tears beyond blood
(O twy-fount, crystal in crimson, of the Word's side),
and she to a background of dark bark, where the wood
becomes one giant tree, were pinned, and plied
through hands to heart by the horn's longing: O she
translucent, planted with virtues, lit by throes,
should be called the Mother of the Unicorn's Voice, men see
her with awe, her son the new sound that goes
surrounding the City's reach, the sound of enskied
shouldering shapes, and there each science disposed,
horn-sharp, blood-deep, ocean and lightning wide,
in her paramours song, by intellectual nuptials unclosed.
7:51:46 PM 
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