To sum up on forms and rightness. No one wants poetry to be like filling out a form, though plenty of poems look dismally like it. The forms were there to be wrestled with mightily, because they silently and emptily, till one filled them up with the thing said, stood for the recalcitrant outside and other that knows nothing of the human will. The mindless rigidity in principle of the verse patterns suggestively compounded with the sinewy nature of the speaking (...) voice that flowed in continuous energy through the marked-off graph of foot and line and strophe. Together they might be taken to stand for two powers of the mind that ought to work with and against one another to the same effect: the streamy nature of association, said Coleridge, that thinking curbs and rudders. Ezra Pound's commandment to the poet, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome, is a good warning against monotonous cadences; but taken literally it invites the reply that Beethoven did both. For art is a place where you make choices, sometimes difficult ones that require you decide not between good and bad but between this good and that: very often it is between the beauty of a line and the sense of the whole thing. A proverb says you can't do two things at once; but it is conspicuous that in art you must always be doing two things at once, knowing that that is only the minimum requirement: And twofold Always. May God us keepFrom Single vision & Newton's sleep! Howard Nemerov, professor of English at Washington University, is the author of, among other works, Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays and The Collected Poems, for which he received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1978. See also: "Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel" by Peter Viereck in Vol. 5, No. 2. (shrink)