The political or other significance of some poet using or not using meter
won't remain a static thing. Pound's and Brecht's opinions wouldn't make
any sense seventy years later (to the minimal extent that they ever did) -
we're not exactly awash with Sidney Keyes now, and we are awash with non-
metrical MBA program poetry which is surely as bourgeois as anything else
that the word could mean today . I reckon there's no shortcut, we have to
taste before we can pronounce. I suspect your "ironic or reactionary" does
covers 88% of cases, but we are not recruiting for the gulags here.
I meant that the words "iamb", "dactyl" etc originated as quantitative
terms referring to feet in Greek and Roman verse. Virgil really did write
iambic hexameters, but Shakespeare's "iambic pentameter" is only
analogical, i.e taking the iambic pattern of "short followed by long" and
using it to mean "unaccented followed by accented". Sorry if I'm restating
the obvious.
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