About Verse

As far as I know all cultures have always had verse: measured language in which something, a stress, a pitch, a length, occurs regularly. I think that to find pleasure and comfort in such language is part of our nature. As poetry has abandoned measure, it has become decidedly less popular, but it has been difficult for many of us to have to give up the enjoyment and aesthetic delight such measured language brings. Since the days of Yeats and Thomas, there has been a tyranny of free verse, an inflexible insistence on the absence of measure, on the suspect nature of

rich sound, as though everyone from Homer through Rilke, and Mallarmé, and Yeats had been laboring under a perverse and noxious delusion. A handful of poets have persisted in following the great formal tradition, but these have been patronized and assigned to a subcategory called “bardic”. The very misunderstanding of that word is demonstration and proof that critics who use it are not to be trusted.

I hope that the good people at Random House are on to something much more than an effective piece of marketing. I think our culture is simply starved for verse, which has been available primarily in the song lyrics adored by the young—a sample limited in many ways but in its popularity a sure sign that no edict can erase or diminish our love of measured language