Blame it on Whitman

David Yezzi has an excellent article in The New Criterion about the study of prosody and the sad decline of traditional verse forms during the past century.

Here's his conclusion:

Surely, first-rate poems continue to be written today, in both meter and free verse. Still, in only a hundred years it would appear that both students of poetry and poets themselves are no longer masters of one of the essential elements of the art form. It’s as if our culture gave up study of the violin or artists no longer learned to draw (now too often the case). Recovery of these tools may take much longer than one might think. A poet cannot simply decide one day to write accomplished blank verse, for example, and expect that his unique stamp will appear on the form. The recent masters of blank verse and other traditional verse—Hecht, Wilbur, Edgar Bowers—spent a lifetime composing their signature music, finding within the language a rhythm distinctly their own, unmistakably, indelibly. If anything, poets and readers today have moved even further away from an appreciation of these gifts, and the tide shows no signs of reversing. For how many subsequent generations will the language of Shakespeare continue to be far too good?

Yezzi considers some of the reasons for the demise of traditional verse forms (for instance, the modernist idea that traditional forms couldn't reflect the chaos of contmeporary reality), and you should read the whole thing, but I'd like to suggest another, more mundane, reason for the state of the current study and practice of prosody -- laziness. Artists and poets are just as vulnerable to the temptations of laziness as anyone else -- especially, I would imagine, when their laziness provides no significant obstacle to the success of their work.

I used to teach high school students, and they hated to have to write poetry in traditional forms, partly because it required them to work harder and partly because, in their opinion, it "cramped their style." They all had some vague idea -- probably some notion that had trickled down to them, in much degraded form, from modernist thought -- that spilling one's half-articulate emotions onto a page was courageous and authentic and artistic. The result of their free verse attempts was always -- and I do mean always -- a jumbled, disjointed, incoherent, undisciplined, self-indulgent mess.

I'll not suggest that that's what modern poets do, as there are still great poems being written in free verse, but the less poets study and practice conventional forms, the less they will understand the paradox by which extreme antipathy to convention makes one a slave to unruly impulses and respect for traditional forms liberates one's thought.