As others have said, the argument between free verse and formal verse has a much stronger political bent in the USA than in the UK. I think it partly goes back to the notion that Whitman was the first great American poet and he wrote in free verse - answering Emerson's demand for a poet who would sing 'our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians...' and all the rest of it. So there grew up this association between free verse and a free nation.
Here's what the critic Edwin Fussell wrote in a key work on American metrics:
'Doubtless his [the American poet's] problem was exacerbated by the fact that the catchword of the youthful culture was "liberty" and the catchword of the parent culture "order". Unfortunately for the English-speaking American poet, English "order" is nowhere more attractively than in English poetry; and nowhere is the English poetic tradition more like a red flag toward a bullheaded American poet than its numbers.' (Lucifer in Harness, 1973)
(Oddly enough Edwin Fussell was the brother of Paul Fussell, who wrote one of the best books ever on metre.)
And then we get W.C. Williams arguing that 'we do not live in a sonnet world; we do not live even in an iambic world; certainly not a world of iambic pentameter." Whereas, of course, everyone in the Shakespeare's England spoke in perfect i.p. all the time...
It is all a little odd, when one thinks that one of the greatest proponents of free verse was Ezra Pound, a Fascist.
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