480
PARTISAN REVIEW
of words jointly condemned by nature and the poet to phonemic
association. Almost every element of poetic form or structure is
enlisted, in all true poetry, in the cause of just such demonstrable
signification. Most readers of poetry leave this matter, its exemplifica–
tion and even its recognition, up
to
the way structuralists talk.
It
is important to observe the milieu of literary fashion that
currently surrounds the reader of literature in verse.
In
the past-even
slightly after World War II, standards of literacy and eloquence
generally being of a higher sort-it was accepted that prose and verse
were rhetorical schemes or patterns, that being able to write good light
or occasional verse did not entail any aspiration to poetry, and that true
poetry,
modern
poetry, had to be problematic, formally speaking. That
is, it had to define itself away from sentimental jingle by means of free
verse or something like it (terribly archaistic and allusive formal
schemes, for irony's sake). But then an inept, flabby free verse became
in the I960s-probably as a result of the "creative writing" industry in
American colleges and high schools-the contemporary equivalent of
greeting card verse jingle. This paralleled the way in which a crude and
trivial veneer of weak irony has become the popular form of poetic
sentimentality: where Reverie was, Experience is. A few older journal–
ists (like, say, Red Smith, whose prose style and general level of verbal
culture are among the most distinguished on
The New York Times
staff), and a few well-educated nonprofessional writers can still proba–
bly write a good, sharp jingle. But the avatars of yesterday'S ambitious
jinglers write today what I have elsewhere called "clunk"; strings of
flat, arbitrarily chopped off lines (save for a crudely ironic enjambment
or two, trotted out with the masked unease of a stand up comic). Free
verse was, for Pound or Williams or Lawrence, harder
to
write, harder
to get the formal point of when you read it, and more literary in its
allusiveness (to biblical prose, to translated ancient and eastern wis–
dom, even-and this is most important-to older forms of verse, being
a kind of revised version of some other structure, although not
immediately recognizable as such to any but another poet or the most
sensitive and eloquent of critics of verse).
For American modernist poetry, free verse became as well some–
thing like the flag of the Whitmanic disposition-that sad piety of the
literalist about Whitman's guises and disguises, embodying such a
wretched travesty of his imaginative genius. But, of course, fashion
induces habit, and habit weakens art and other noble work. Today,
good
free verse is as hard to write as ever. Even though most aspiring
poets write nothing but free verse, and more young people have been
