We live in the age of free verse “poetry”,
poetry without rhythm or rhyme. Free verse
is the only poetry that is given awards to, or
recognized these days. Most modern poets
write it, and off the top of my head I cannot
name a single Canadian, American, or
English poet creating traditional rhyming
poetry. The only published poets I have ever
encountered in real life wrote free verse.
Back when I was in English class in high
school and poetry class in CEGEP (a couple
of years tacked on to high school in a
college in Quebec), the anthologies I had
to study presented traditional rhyming
poetry as the past and free verse as the
future. It was usually described as new,
fresh, inventive, ground-breaking, etc.,
but it has been around now for around a
hundred years, and surely these super-
latives cannot still apply to an art-form
that we have been acquainted with our
whole lives, that is taught in school, and
whose most famous and respected practi-
tioners are now all long dead and gone?
Free verse was originally the plaything
of a small group of bohemians around the
start of the 20th century. The sort of bo-
hemians that longed for the freedom to be
more hedonistic and saw themselves as
enemies of Christianity and Western
civilization. Their art was basically a
finger to the Western tradition. As luck
would have it, European civilization
received a crippling blow to its confi-
dence with the slaughter of World War I.
Suddenly, the attitudes and nihilistic
experiments of free verse poets and
modern artists, whose creations were
often nothing more than jokes and insults,
gained respectability and intellectual
credibility, and were feted and funded by
an increasing powerful moneyed elite that
was different from the traditional nobility,
in that despised the common man even
more than the old elite. This elite believed
they owed no allegiance to any nation or
religion, and were eager to sweep away
Christian Europe in favour of godless
global government. The horrors of World
War II delivered an even greater wound to
European culture and its self-image, and
free verse and modern art became
institutionalized thereafter as the dominant
art forms of the materialistic and post-
Christian world we live in.
This degradation of art and poetry was,
and is, celebrated and accepted as "self-
expression” and “freedom”, but now that
the dust has settled, rather than something
liberating, free verse can be seen to fit
perfectly into a plan for a society of in-
creased control, surveillance, and censor-
ship because it is the form of poetry that
communicates nothing meaningful and
concrete to the reader. Its typical
vacuousness and inarticulateness is an
advantageous feature in a time of mass
communication, in that it requires no need
of monitoring and censoring. As people
of the 21th century, we have been taught
and become accustomed to deceiving
ourselves that we find pleasure and
enlightenment in nonsense and artlessness,
the way people in the fairy tale admired
the Emperor’s new clothes. Such induced
madness and lack of critical thinking works
to the benefit of governments and big
businesses that may want to later on
convince us that a war or some loss of
freedom we suffer is good for us.
True poetry and art is about communi-
cation, reaching out to other people and
showing that you have feelings and dreams
in common with them. Rhyming traditional
verse was always a far more democratic,
popular, and censor-free form of poetry, in
that you did not even need to read and
write to create it (as for example: Duncan
Ban MacIntryre / Donnchadh Bàn Mac
an t-Saoir could not read a word of his
poetry). The common people used to have
great pride in their national poets and
could recite their poems by heart.
Memorization was aided by standards and
conventions in rhythm and rhyme. These
conventions provided a reliable framework
in which to place your art, and by using
them you were not at all restricted, but col-
laborating with a tradition; rather than
selfishly indulging in a project of unap-
pealing self-expression which has no need
for skill or hard work. Technically, the
purpose of rhyme is to tell a listener where
a line in a poem ends, and the rhythm lets
you know where to expect a rhyme.
Rhythm and rhyme working together can
make the most mudane observations sound
magical and profound, the words fitting
together so pleasantly and perfectly. When
Johnny Cochran argued “If it don’t fit, you
must acquit!” he was invoking this kind of
magic: that what he was arguing was right
because it sounded so right. Due to free
verse being a medium that mainly exists
on paper, and it is only by seeing it on
paper that one can understand that it is
not prose, it only came into dominance
in an era of mass publishing and allowed
publishers to determine who was and
was not a poet rather than the public.
Before the internet, if you self-published,
it was seen as an act of vanity, and presses
that catered to poets and writers that did
not measure up to the prejudices of the
big publishers were called “vanity
presses”. Even excellent poets like A.E.
Housman had to pay to have their work
printed. Traditional verse did not have to
be outlawed, it just did not have to be
published.
The promotion of free verse also
seems to be part of a broader campaign
of instilling in people the dangerous
idea of that elitism and rule by experts
is the correct way. The inaccessibility of
free verse suggests that art is not for the
masses but for connoisseurs, and
majority will just have to put up with
unpleasantness or be condemned as
bores. Without comprehensible
poetry, people have no other way of un-
derstanding the world except through the
official pronouncements of the government,
or through the propaganda dished out by
the mass media and the entertainment
industry. All this is to the benefit of
those who like things the way they are,
that is: the people that wish to profit
from us, rule us, and experiment on us. I
cannot recall any modern free verse poets
or poems ever being condemned by the
government or press during my lifetime;
they are seen as no threat by the powers
that be. I can see a future where artless
free verse will be churned out by civil-
servants aided by AI, and celebrated.
Rather than a natural progression in the
art of poetry, free verse is a negation of
tradition.
I am sure that I could find many
people that would agree with everything
I have written so far (excluding those
whose profession depends on promoting
free verse, or those who consider them-
selves free verse poets). Where most
people would probably part ways with me
would be in regard to my contention that
that poetry should be sung and not read,
but it is vital to poetry’s rebirth that this
idea must be reconsidered. As a result of
the long reign of free verse poetry, the view
that poetry should sound exactly like prose
has become entrenched. This belief is so
strong that whenever people encounter
traditional poetry, they thoughtlessly read
it aloud instead of even singing it. The pre-
judice against the singing of poetry is truly
amazing. As a Gael, I am aware that in the
Gaelic tradition there was no difference
between poem and song. That such a tra-
dition surely once existed in England, when
poetry was transmitted orally is beyond
question to me, yet I clearly remember a
hippie high-school teacher I had praising a
poem specifically because it sounded like
conventional speech. The fact that
Shakespeare is often hailed as the greatest
English poet seems to have to do with the
fact that the bulk of his work is unrhyming
iambic pentameter which is usually delivered
as a dramatic-reading style rather than as
poetry. Why is it so important that poetry
should sound like prose? The Aeneid begins
with the line: “Of arms and the man I sing!”
not “Of arms and the man I talk!” English
speakers have forgotten their singing heri-
tage and have developed a philosophy to
explain away their lost tradition, in the
same way that the Victorians developed
a false admiration of Greek sculpture for
its whiteness, when in fact it was all once
gaudily painted. I will record some videos
for Youtube in which I will try to “sing”
poems so that their correct rhythm can be
heard, or, at least, read them with a defi-
nite beat.
Whether traditional poetry survives is
not just as academic question (as academia
has no interest in it). The fact that nobody
is concerned about it is chilling proof of how
far down the road we have gone towards
some dystopian anti-art world.
The celebration and rewarding of low-
effort art and thought, certainly discourages
serious effort by the truly talented. Good
art is hard to create, and takes time to
execute. If it is not recognized and re-
warded, it will not be pursued. The skills
to create great things are lost when not
taught to the next generation but if prestige,
awards, and patronage were granted to
traditional-minded poets, artists, and
architects, I am sure that we would soon
see creations equal to the glories of the
past. Traditional poetry that rhymes, and
has rhythm, and is sung and transmitted
orally has to come back for the sake of
democracy, freedom, and civilization.
The dominance of free verse is based on
political, and not artistic, merit. Beauty,
logic, and the truth are things people will
always cherish, and I think people are
bound to demand that we return to real
art and good values as they are more
explicitly asked in the future to worship
and praise still more ugly and awful
things.
© C.A. MacLennan 2023
Videos of me reciting poems can
be found at: Poetry & Folklore - YouTube
