Modernism In Other Arts Brought Extreme Difficulty.

Among Those Today Who Believe That Modern Poetry Must Do Without Rhyme Or Metre, There Is An Assumption That The Alternative To Free Verse Is A Crash Course In Villanelles, Sestinas And Other Such Fixed Forms. But Most... Are Rare In English Poetry. Few Poets Have Written A Villanelle Worth Reading, Or Indeed Regret Not Having Done So.

One Does Not Become A Guru By Accident.

A Poem With Grandly Conceived And Executed Stanzas, Such As One Of Keats's Odes, Should Be Like An Enfilade Of Rooms In A Palace: One Proceeds, With Eager Anticipation, From Room To Room.

The Voice Is Raised, And That Is Where Poetry Begins. And Even Today, In The Prolonged Aftermath Of Modernism, In Places Where "open Form" Or Free Verse Is The Orthodoxy, You Will Find A Memory Of That Raising Of The Voice In The Term "heightened Speech".

I've Not Been A Prolific Poet, And It Always Seemed To Me To Be A Bad Idea To Feel That You Had To Produce In Order To Get... Credits. Production Of A Collection Of Poems Every Three Years Or Every Five Years, Or Whatever, Looks Good, On Paper. But It Might Not Be Good; It Might Be Writing On A Kind Of Automatic Pilot.