I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.
The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.