Embracing Poetic Craft
But there was another whole set of crows which he used always at certain special hours during the day. These did come in due time; and these were called the “canonical crows.” They told all the world—at least that section of the world over which he was Lord—what time it was, and they blessed the moment in the ears of the hearer. By what blessing? By making the day, and that moment of the day, familiar; by giving it direction and meaning and a proper soul. [...] It was a comfort to be able to measure the day and the work in it.
—The Book of the Dun Cow,
Walter Wangerin, Jr.
There is another whole set of poems in the free-verse poet who endeavors to learn the craft of poetry. Like the canonical crows in The Book of the Dun Cow, writing with meter “blesses” the poem by making it “familiar” (grants it truths), gives the lines “direction and meaning” (makes them good), and gives it a “proper soul” (makes it beautiful).
As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I took two poetry workshops. I cannot recall any poems with meter or rhyme. What I do remember is that experimentation, introspection, and performance art were encouraged as the essentials of poetic craft. In the introduction of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter, Timothy Steele writes, “By the end of the nineteenth century, it is widely argued that art […] should be ‘experimental’ and produce ‘breakthroughs’ and ‘discoveries.’” He adds that the literary tradition was “like the scientific past, largely irrelevant to present practice” and writing in meter was a form of “poetic stagnation.” This accurately reflects the metrically formless environment in which I first started writing poetry. Combined with my department’s emphasis on Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist criticism, free verse was presented as progress. It was an unencumbered and liberating writing space for the poet.
Thirty years later, as a graduate student who has just completed a class called the “Craft of Poetry: The Philosophy, Grammar, and Practice of Poetry,” a class in the University of St. Thomas’ new Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, the allure of free verse has been diminished. After a semester of exploring meter and versification, I’m convinced that sacrificing the endowments of measured speech, rhyme, and metrical forms—the “canonical crows” that bring delight—is not worth the promised liberation and freedom. In other words, you lose more than you gain by writing in free verse.
In the first chapter of The Book of the Dun Cow, Wangerin writes, “When Chauntecleer crowed his canonical crows, the day wore the right kind of clothes.” Meter and metrical form dress the poem for the poetic occasion and establish a poetic boundary. Additionally, it is an underlying poetic foundation on which to place the line. I’m tempted to see free verse as rather under-dressed: pajamas at the ball or perhaps even nakedness. Meter and metrical forms assist the poet similar to how the rule of law benefits a society. Both establish order and expectation. As a form, free verse stands by idly, quite possibly weakening and even working against the poet.
The True—Meter “blesses” the poem and makes it familiar.
The sounds of Chauntecleer’s crows were regular, established, and recognized by the animals. In a similar way, meter provides a measured regularity that makes the poetic line recognizable. Since iambic pentameter—the lilting back and forth of stressed and unstressed syllables—is in our natural rhythms of speech, it is familiar footing for the listener. The rhythmic instructions of the poetic line are known, and back to Wangerin’s text, they “bless the moment, in the ears of the hearer.” Since the iambic line cradles our natural forms of speech—aural truths if you will—we don’t need to seek breakthroughs, discoveries, and departures. Learning to modulate the poetic line with inverted first feet, headless first feet, mid-line trochaic substitutions, feminine endings, and enjambments keeps the line both “free” and familiar. Abandoning meter does not revive antiquated diction. If our text is stilted, we should fault ourselves and not the medium.
The Good—Metrical forms give “direction and meaning.”
In a similar way, metrical forms and rhyme encourage a pattern of expectations. They direct the writer, the line, and the reader. These forms are foundational and engage the poet in an ongoing conversation with other poets. In a November 2021 interview with EWTN, Joseph Pearce states, “Without Homer, there’s no Virgil. Without Virgil, there’s no Dante.” He calls the tradition, “a living thing that grows through the millennia where we’re all building upon the shared experiences of goodness, truth, and beauty, and the lessons we can learn about our own shared humanity and our relationship with God.” Writing with meter and metrical forms places you in an ongoing conversation with other poets and readers. I would rather be in the conversation instead of a monologue.
The Beautiful—Meter and metrical forms create a “proper soul.”
Meter and metrical forms produce an order that can be imagined as the “proper soul” of the poem. In the chapter on “Poetry and Precedent,” Steele describes Wordsworth’s description of the “wonderful paradox of successful metrical composition: It is speech which is natural, and at the same time, is ordered within and played off against the norm of a fixed line.” Steele quotes Wordsworth who writes, “metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit.” In metrical poems, the poet is able to speak more clearly and directly to the reader because there is a standard. In free verse, because of the subjective lack of standard, a reader is unnecessarily distanced from the poet. The rules and laws of metrical poetry provide an underlying grid structure that supports the poetic line. While they can be obvious or subtle, their presence conveys a properly ordered aural foundation. There is the sense that things are holding together, not falling apart. This “proper soul” is the part of the poem created by the poem itself, the essence that surprises and delights even the poet.
Our culture delights in challenging and transforming “tradition” and “convention.” For poetry, scrutinizing outdated language, idiom, diction, and subject matter is reasonable but the abandonment of meter and metrical forms has injured the craft. Talking about conventions in general in his essay “Conventions and the Individual Talent,” Paul Fussel, Jr. writes, “conventions do not restrain expression: they make it possible. Far from curbing creativity, they actually release it.” He notes that a private convention is “a contradiction in terms.” In this sense, it is clear that free verse is more likely to stifle creativity than liberate it and a poet’s claim to a private convention runs the risk of placing them in an obscure, monologue-filled Tower of Babel. Frederick Turner, in his essay “Lyric and the Content of Poetry,” asks a compelling question when he writes, “The question we will have to face is whether the individual self, cut loose from its communal and past foundations, is worth celebrating.” It’s worth considering that we should answer “no.” We should not celebrate the demise of the “canonical crows,” the historical voice of poetic tradition.
Poetry’s conventions of meter, rhyme, stanza, and rhetorical organization keep us in dialogue with the poetic tradition. Instead of the straitjackets of obsolete poetic rules, meter and metrical forms are underlying structures of order that elevate speech and concentrate poetic vision. They challenge the poet to be more precise and intentional with the poetic line. Certainly, a great poem can be written without meter, but a poem with meter has a natural advantage. Learning to write in meter involves surrender because—like saying to God, “Not my will be done, but Yours”—you must abandon the role of rule maker and ultimate arbiter. The reward of this surrender is two-fold: the hope of writing good, true, and beautiful poetry and, echoing Wangerin’s words, the comfort of being able to “measure the day and the work in it.”
"Storm Crow" by Pandiyan is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
