Published in Verse, Volume 10, No 3, 1994.

To the continuing discussion of “New Formalism” which, from the outset, has offered more petulance than dispassion, and more confusion than not, Jonathan Holden, in his recent essay, “The Old Formalism” (Verse, Vol 10, No 2), only contributes more of the same.

Petulance and confusion are equally apparent in Holden’s opening assertion, that certain poets, known collectively as the “New Formalists”, are “dishonest” in their use of that term.  The petulance here is in Holden’s passing off as criticism what is in fact only name-calling.  The confusion is in assuming that the label, “New Formalists”, was either coined by the poets themselves, or that they have ever been satisfied with it.  Neither is the case.  The term “New Formalists” was first coined as a term of dismissal and denigration by Ariel Dawson, in her essay, “The Yuppie Poet” (AWP Newsletter, May 1985), and many of the poets in question have criticized the label from the beginning as being both inaccurate and misleading.  To accuse these poets of dishonesty for employing a term they neither coined nor claim is an instance of either bad scholarship, bad faith, or both.

What is needed, if there is to be any hope of clarity in the discussion surrounding New Formalism is, first of all, a settling of terms.

It would be well to begin with “form” and “formal”, as a widespread confusion seems to exist concerning their precise meaning.  Form, according to Webster’s Third International Dictionary, is “the shape and structure of something as distinguished from the material of which it is composed.”   A more specifically aesthetic definition might be simply “the elements of a work of art which contribute to its total effect.”  Thus any work of art, any poem, which possesses a “total effect”, necessarily possesses form.  In other words, regardless of their type, all (successful) poems are formal and all poets formalists.  To distinguish between formal and free-verse poems is no more meaningful than to distinguish between fruit and pears.

Another term in need of definition is meter, for it is in his discussion of free-verse and meter that Holden makes one of his primary contentions: that free verse is metrical and that the “New Formalists” are therefore “dishonest” in their exclusive claim to this quality.  Meter, according to Webster’s, is “systematic and measured rhythm in verse; rhythm that continuously repeats a single basic pattern or rhythmic system; rhythm characterized by the regular recurrence of a systematic arrangement of such basic patterns or systems into larger figures”.  Note the key terms and phrases here: “systematic”,  “measured”,  “continuously repeats”,  “a single basic pattern”,  “regular recurrence”,  and so forth.  If, as Holden asserts, free verse is, in any sense, metrical, he is giving “metrical” a definition which differs fundamentally from that offered by Webster’s.  Unless Holden wishes to open himself to his own charge of deception, he should at least state precisely what his new definition is.

Holden contends that free verse comprises  “a medley of traditional prosodies”.  He characterizes the prosody of free verse as “heterogeneous” as opposed to the “homogeneous” prosody of metrical verse.  This familiar claim is of no real significance to his argument.  Of course there will be fragments of free verse which scan as regular meter.  The same is true of prose, spoken conversation and Campbell soup labels, for that matter.  The traditional meters of English evolved naturally from the language itself and are intrinsic to it.   It is inevitable that there will be “echoes” of these meters in any passage of English one cares to examine.  One would have to write very deliberately to avoid such echoes.

But of what consequence are such isolated metrical fragments?  For rhythm to make a distinct impression on the ear and to establish a pattern of expectation against which variation becomes meaningful, rhythm requires recurrence and duration.  In other words, regularity – and regularity, by definition, is precisely what free verse lacks.  In speaking of meter which is “heterogeneous”,  Holden is arguing, in effect, for the existence of a discontinuous meter, a notion possessing the same ontological status as lissome toads and grievous smiles.

In discussing the virtues of free verse, Holden wants to have it both ways: he contends that free verse, even as it sheds the constraint of regular meter, somehow retains “ghostly strains” of that meter’s music.  But one cannot dispense with the basis for a particular quality without losing that quality in the process, any more than a bird can shed its wings without losing the ability to fly.  Whatever residue of meter might remain in free verse would be there in any case, simply as an innate attribute of the language.

Holden makes one further attempt to establish his point by re-lineating two free verse poems to demonstrate a “hidden” accentual regularity, what Holden referes to as a “secondary” rhythm lurking beneath the surface of the “primary” rhythm.  He breaks each poem into new lines in order to reveal hitherto unnoticed rhyme and meter.  The patent illogic of this method evidently escapes Professor Holden so I shall spell it out:  namely, his argument is utterly dependent on a visual demonstration, on the re-lineation of a poem on the page, apparent to the eye alone.  Need it be mentioned that rhythm and meter are matters of sound, not sight?  The ear cannot detect line-breaks unless they are highlighted by meter, rhyme, or both.  Holden shows us a free-verse poem lineated in three possible ways but, read aloud, each version sounds identical.  To the ear, they are all equally unmetrical.

A word here might be said about Holden’s efforts to avoid referring to poetry in regular forms as metrical, lest he should imply that free verse is unmetrical.  The designation he prefers to “metrical” is “accentual-syllabic end-rhymed verse” which, apart from being an extraordinarily awkward locution, is completely inadequate.  Most contemporary metrical verse is not end-rhymed, but blank verse (i.e., Michael Heffernan’s “The House of God”, all the poems in Robert Pack’s Faces in a Single Tree;  John Finlay’s “The Blood of Shiloh”)—and much of it is not accentual-syllabic, but either accentual (i.e., Jared Carter’s “Cecropia Moth”;  Dana Gioia’s  “Insommnia”;  Eric Pankey’s  “Scaffolding”),  or syllabic (i.e., Brad Leithauser’s  “A Flight from Osaka”;  Charles Martin’s  “Calvus in Ruins”).  What all of it is, is metrical. 

So far, this essay has concerned itself with the problematic auditory qualities of free verse and Holden’s rather large claims concerning them.  But Holden makes even larger claims for the semantic advantages of free verse over metered verse:

In free verse . . . , without the assurance of the metrical foot to call attention to the verbal surface of a poem, poets will, instinctively almost, turn to semantic means: stocking lines with conspicuous metaphors and similes, as if to compensate in the domain of “sense” what they have had to give up in the domain of sound . . .

Having made this observation, that free-verse must compensate semantically for what it loses audially, Holden proceeds to the conclusion that metrical verse will therefore use more “conventional”,  prosaic language.

In accentual-syllabic verse, metaphors and similes will tend . . . not to be deployed explicitly for display (!) . . . they will be conventional ones, extended to make an argument.

Holden supports this logic by contrasting a free verse poem with striking language to a metered poem with conventional language.  What is proven by this?  Because one metered poem is conventional, are all metered poems conventional?  Because one free verse poem is striking, are they all?  Professor Holden could benefit form a course in rudimentary logic.

Apparently Holden’s reasoning is that because free verse must rely more heavily on semantic means to compensate for its lack of “sonic texture”, it follows that free verse will employ those means more effectively than metered verse.  Yet a greater reliance on something hardly guarantees greater expertise in its use.  And it certainly does not follow that, because metered verse is less dependent on semantic means, it will therefore be less adept in their use.  By Holden’s logic, fearful boys who must whistle past graveyards to compensate for their lack of courage will necessarily be gifted musicians, while fearless boys, who do not need to rely on their whistling, will therefore possess tin ears.

Holden’s contention that to write in meter is to write conventionally is, frankly, incredible.  One cannot help but wonder whether Holden has ever read Shakespeare, Donne, Vaughn, Coleridge, Browning, or Crane.  Does Professor Holden consider the poetry of such poets or, say, these stanzas by one of his contemporaries, Charles Martin, to be conventional?

All history was troubled by a dream,

The constant world shook with metaphor.

In an open field once before their time

He summoned her as water, aether, air ---

Wishing was having then, and branch was root ---

They flourished like the dead do, underfoot.

(The dead ones have no perspective on events),

They came together there, they broke apart,

Were fiery as grass beneath a lens

And like the fishes in the water, wet.

He knew her body’s risk, his body’s task;

Wild speech took shape behind a formal mask . . .

Holden’s next claim causes one to question how much poetry prior to the Modernists he has even read:

A . . . significant limitation to end-rhymed accentual syllabic poetry may be its inherently public character.   …(T)he public, oratorical quality of end-rhymed accentual-syllabic verse is incommensurable with the intimate quality of good free verse, its capacity to manifest a sense of individual “voice”.   That the subjectivity of most modernist poetry and the invention of free verse historically coincide is probably no accident.

There is so much wrong with this paragraph one hardly knows where to begin.  Holden confuses content with form, apparently forgets that all the greater Modernists wrote in regular meter as well as in free verse, and suggests that subjectivity in poetry began with the Modernists.  It is in this linking of subjectivity with the rise of free verse that Holden’s knowledge of English and American poetry must be brought into question.  Has Professor Holden forgotten the nineteenth century?  What Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”, Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”, much of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, Wordsworth’s “Prelude”, not to mention any number of other poems from the century, all in various regular meters and all with a strong subjective strain?  One might compare Emily Dickinson, whose poems are based upon the meters of hymns, to old magnanimous Walt, that pioneer of free verse --- who was the extrovert and who the introvert?  Even in Wordsworth’s day, subjectivity was hardly the latest thing, with the (always metrical) poetry of sensibility, religious introspection and melancholia stretching back some two centuries earlier through “Samson Agonistes” to “Hamlet” and “Lear”.  Subjectivity in Modernist and contemporary poetry is only the latest minor strain in a very old song.

Holden refers to the supposed connection between free verse and “individual voice”.  What precisely he means by this “sense of individual voice” is left unexplained, but the phrase is, or course, a commonplace in discussions of contemporary poetry.  The assumptions which underlie it are suggested in a passage from Robert Bly’s essay on Denise Levertov (American Poetry: Domesticity and Wildness, 1990):

In good “free” verse, all the supposed requirements of meter, of parallelism, of syllable count, of repeatable stanza, are shunned, so that the poetic conventions will be replaced by the poet’s voice.

The implication in both Holden and Bly is that, unless a poet eschews meter in favor of free verse, he or she cannot achieve the “individual voice” they speak of.  In other words, the poet’s voice is determined by the choice of form.  Thus, in their view, form determines content.  Neither Holden nor Bly specifies what he means by this “voice”, but both apparently see it as something so fragile that it cannot survive the “rough handling” of regular meter.  One has to wonder what this rare, diaphanous quality might be--- this “individual voice” that only free-verse poets are privileged to possess.  The keening of metrical poets, deprived of such precious attar, can be heard even now.  Hardy, Yeats, Frost and a host of other lost poet-souls must be gnashing their teeth in the purgatorial shadows for lack of it.

            Holden suggests a further limitation of metered verse when he celebrates the ability of certain free-verse poems, due to their freedom of lineation, to “cherish . . . individual units of figurative language”, as if there were no metered verse with an equal suppleness, an equal ability to match line with syntax.  Professor Holden should open his Prior, his Tennyson, his Stevens.  He should consider a passage such as the following and ask himself what in its language is conventional or how, by being rendered in free verse, syntax could be fitted more flawlessly to line:

“The stars,” she whispers, “blindly run;

     A web is wov’n across the sky;

     From out waste places comes a cry,

And murmurs from the dying sun.

“And all the phantom, Nature, stands ---

     With all the music in her tone,

     A hollow echo of my own, ---

A hollow form with empty hands.”

And shall I take a thing so blind,

     Embrace her as my natural good,

     Or crush her, like a vice of blood,

Upon the threshold of the mind?”

Ultimately the problem with Holden’s whole view of poetry is that it lacks historical perspective; it seems to be unconscious of any poetry earlier than Whitman’s.  How else dcould Holden make such sweeping, insupportable claims as that the use of metered verse, by its nature, results in conventional language, a lack of subjectivity or “individual voice”, a public rather than personal tone, an awkward joining of syntax to line?