Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
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Thursday, July 15, 2004

There are of course many ways to make poems, some just as formally constrained as the usual meters, but none, not even the free verse of the last century, has been the basis of a body of work remotely comparable in quality and variety to that produced in the accentual-syllabic tradition. It's not for lack of trying, or talent, or even genius.

The reason is that in our language no other method is able to play a perceptible, formal rhythmic impulse against the rhythms of ordinary speech in such endlessly varied and expressive ways. We can't even hear syllabic or quantitative verse in English. Accentual prosodies can't modulate what happens in normally unstressed syllables. Free verse depends on line breaks and syntactical rhythms, both also available in every other kind of poem. The more exotic formalisms — mathematical, aleatory, graphic, to name a few — distort the poem's language in an even more ludicrous fashion than does badly handled meter.

Accentual-syllabic verse lives by this rhythmic interplay. If the meter is so variable that it becomes unnoticeable, it cannot affect the way we read or hear the poem. If the meter distorts the poem's language beyond what might be possible in human speech, the effect is risible or boring and probably both. It matters that poets in this tradition care both about our syllable-and-stress patterning and about writing in the language of one human being speaking to others about things that make a human difference.


Update 7/16: That first sentence above should begin "There are of course many ways to make poems in English, …" I do not presume to speak for poetry in other languages, in some of which accentual-syllabic verse is as impossible as true quantitative or tonal prosodies are in ours.


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