Quote:
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Meter displaces natural speech. Meter obliterates natural speech. Like a drummer in a good band, meter provides the beat--the heartbeat--of a good poem. Contemporary critics, fools that they are, like to say, in writing no less, that they admire a certain poem's "conversational rhythms." The problem with this bit of sophistry is that poetry is not conversation, no more than it is prose. If a poet takes the time and trouble to cast his thoughts into rhyme and meter, why in the world would you or anyone want to de-emphasize the music? As they might say in Oklahoma, if you decide to put wings on a horse, you can't just ride around in your backyard.
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This sounds a bit silly to me -- so possibly I'm misunderstanding it.
One can write poetry (metrical or otherwise) that has a conversation feel, and poetry that doesn't. Maybe rather than conversational, it's songlike or oratory or manic or plodding or something else. Conversation and natural speech do, after all, have their own rhythms.
"If a poet takes the time and trouble to cast his thoughts into rhyme and meter, why in the world would you or anyone want to de-emphasize the music?"
This question seems to cede the point that one can write poetry with conversation rhythms, having said that such a claim is sophistry.
The question also seems assume that conversation rhythms come at the cost of metrical rhythm. If the poem is still in metre, it's still going to have that beat. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
It also seems to imply that all poetry should be musical, as if there were no other moods. What if we want flat and sombre, what if we want to sound like a robot from the 31st century, or a legal document, or someone broken by grief? Unless we're trapped in a musical, why would we always want to sound like we're singing?
Here's my general take on statements like this:
From time to time people want to make limiting claims about poetry. Some people will tell you prose poems aren't poetry. Some people will say poems should only use the language of natural speech. Some people will tell you it should never use the language of natural speech. Others that metrical verse is only true poetry. Others that rhyming verse is past its sell-by date. And so on.
Meanwhile poetry just gets on with doing its own thing without looking around for permission from those who feel the need to lay down the law. And me, I just get on with enjoying it while it does.
Matt