Free Verse is Less Free than Fixed Verse: True-False?

Stop!

I would never suggest that poets abandon this rhetorical device, or any other. But in the last several decades, poets have come practically to identify such laconic formulations and portentous amputations with poetic speech—poetic diction—itself. In consequence, a poet is encouraged not to make much discursive sense. Poetry should be, and has always been composed of grammatical sentences that have the added sophistication wrought by the demands of meter and, sometimes, rhyme. It should be, in that sense, prose with something extra grafted to the bone. But contemporary poets frequently suggest, by example, that what is to be considered poetic is specifically that which is not prose because it is less than prose. It is prose without the grammar. Prose without the coherence. Prose without the self-evident order of left-to-right progression across the page and unassuming columns of text. It is prose on the verge of slipping off into non-being and capable of emitting only that last terrible whimper:

I’m melting.

Rather, I insist that grammar is essential to poetry because it offers one freedom, in the same way our speech offers us more freedom of communication than the grunts of a hog or the barks of a dog. And grammatical poetry, in order not to be merely lineated prose, really does depend on the backbone of meter and, in our language, most often, the forked legs of rhyme.