The poetry debate …

… The Ideology of Anti-Poetry | Public Discourse. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Wilson tries to avoid an overly simplified contrast between free verse and formal poetry. He recognizes—or at least he seems to—that verse forms are not immutable. Poetry is metered language that has a story-telling function, which makes it both “a mode of philosophical inquiry” and “a means to ethical truth.” But even free verse can be ordered by sound, as Wilson suggests in brief discussions of Dana Gioia’s free-verse lyrics and Geoffrey Hill’s late meditations. Gioia’s free verse, Wilson writes, is “always metrical in the way that Eliot’s was.”