for my poet loves:
Oct. 9th, 2003 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
honeymonsterThe poet without imagination or folly enough to play tennis by serving and returning the ball over an invisible net may see himself as highly disciplined. There have been poets who could and did play more than one game of tennis with unseen rackets, volleying airy and fantastic balls over an insubstantial net, on a frail moonlit fabric of a court.
The arguments against free verse are old. They are not, however, as old as free verse itself. When primitive and prehistoric man first spoke with cadence or color, making either musical meaning or melodic nonsense words worth keeping or repeating for its definite and intrinsic values, then free verse was born, ages before the sonnet, the ballad, the verse forms wherein the writer or singer must be acutely conscious, even exquisitely aware, of how many syllables are to be arithmetically numbered per line.
The matter should not be argued. Those who make poems and hope their poems are not bad may find readers or listeners--and again they may not. The affair should rest there. nothing can be proved except that some poets have one kind of readers or listeners--and other poets have other kinds.
--Carl Sandburg
The arguments against free verse are old. They are not, however, as old as free verse itself. When primitive and prehistoric man first spoke with cadence or color, making either musical meaning or melodic nonsense words worth keeping or repeating for its definite and intrinsic values, then free verse was born, ages before the sonnet, the ballad, the verse forms wherein the writer or singer must be acutely conscious, even exquisitely aware, of how many syllables are to be arithmetically numbered per line.
The matter should not be argued. Those who make poems and hope their poems are not bad may find readers or listeners--and again they may not. The affair should rest there. nothing can be proved except that some poets have one kind of readers or listeners--and other poets have other kinds.
--Carl Sandburg
