What Happened To Poetry In

Among Those Today Who Believe That Modern Poetry Must Do Without Rhyme Or Metre, There Is An Assumption That The Alternative To Free Verse Is A Crash Course In Villanelles, Sestinas And Other Such Fixed Forms. But Most... Are Rare In English Poetry. Few Poets Have Written A Villanelle Worth Reading, Or Indeed Regret Not Having Done So.

At Somewhere Around 10 Syllables, The English Poetic Line Is At Its Most Relaxed And Manageable.

Composers Need Words, But They Do Not Necessarily Need Poetry. The Russian Composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, Who Chose Texts From Newspaper Small Ads, Had A Good Point To Make. With Revolutionary Music, Any Text Can Be Set To Work.

At Four Lines, With The Quatrain, We Reach The Basic Stanza Form Familiar From A Whole Range Of English Poetic Practice. This Is The Length Of The Ballad Stanza, The Verse Of A Hymn, And Innumerable Other Kinds Of Verse.

Lyric Poetry Is, Of Course, Musical In Origin. I Do Know That What Happened To Poetry In The Twentieth Century Was That It Began To Be Written For The Page. When It's A Question Of Typography, Why Not? Poets Have Done Beautiful Things With Typography - Apollinaire's 'calligrammes,' That Sort Of Thing.