Yes, Michael, looking back at your original post I see it was more
about the metrical line than predetermined forms like sonnets, though
the distinction isn't entirely clear.

We're in complete agreement here. There's no doubt that metre and
metrical verse are oudated museum curiosities. As you say, doublet
and hose stuff. They belong to the oral tradition when poetry was cast
in predictable rhythms to aid memorization and summon up trance
like states. There's no call for that sort of behaviour nowadays. As you
say, we have a different toolbox, and anyway, who hears the blank
verse in Shakespeare anymore? Not actors, not directors, not
audiences.

The late Anthony Easthope noted that both Pound and Brecht - fascist
and communist - rejected the pentameter (Brecht said he detested its
'oily smoothness') and both rejected liberalism and the notion of the
transcendental ego. For Brecht, 'the continuity of the ego is a myth'
while according to Pound 'One says I AM...and with the words scarcely
uttered one ceases to be that thing' So it seems to me that the
postmodern rejection of metre since Pound and Olson is a political
decision and the atavistic survival of metre in contemporary poetry
hints at a reactionary agenda. Like linear perspective in art and
Western harmony in music, metre has been bonded to bourgeois
culture since the Renaissance. I'd go so far as to say that the use of
metre in 2004 is either ironic or reactionary.

Cheers
Alan

PS Not to nitpick, but when you say
There's no accentual pulse [in the Lopez quotation] ("iambic" or
"anapaestic" - to make the traditional appropriations from quantitative
measure")
 you've got a term wrong. Quantitative measure refers not to
accentual-syllabic feet like iambs and dactyls but to Greek prosody,
which is based on the varying musical length of syllables.