Which continues to fall …

… T.S. Eliot, Poet for a Fallen Culture - Washington Free Beacon. (Hat tip,  G. E. Reutter.)

Only modernism could convey sufficiently the negative part: The breakdown of traditional civilization had to be echoed in the objective correlative of the breakdown of traditional verse. This wasn’t free verse as a declaration of new freedom. This was free verse as a howl that culture itself had failed.