“Meter,” Paul Fussell writes, “is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance.” This from Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (first published in 1965), which tempers its fundamental conservatism with excellent pages on Whitman, which form part of an excellent chapter on “free verse.” I was reminded of this book and of these passages during an e-mail dialogue with a professor of […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: New Yorker, poetry