Saturday, May 28, 2005

Free verse: a warning from history

The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (1986):

For [the New Poets] poetic form was unimportant and they believed that the strict metres were unsuitable for the expression of great thoughts; it was the message and the sublimity of the content that mattered. Alas, the message of the New Poet was often far from clear: his work was vitiated by verbosity and empty rhetoric, by which means he sought to ask unanswerable questions about the meaning of Life and the essence of the Universe.

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