Doug asked:
> I guess, for Gwynn, but why New' anyway?
This came up in a conversation with Judy -- what about the UK New
Formalists?
I tried to suggest that the term doesn't make sense in the UK as there was
never a time when formal verse wasn't being written by major poets here, and
happily (or not) coexisting with free verse. Whereas in the US, free verse
seemed to have swept the board completely (I stress "seemed") so Gioia et
alia felt called upon to reinvent it. .
Then Judy asked what forms UK formal poets write in and I was kinda stumped.
"Everything" I (more or less) answered.
But where in the categories of formal (or not) verse one would place Francis
Berry who wrote (in the fifties to the seventies roughly) in a metre that
would have been what the OE/ME alliterative line would have become if it
hadn't stopped evolving.
(In "Morant Bay" and _Ghosts of Greenland_ -- in contrast to Auden in _The
Orators_, where the alliterative metre is an exercise in prosodic
archeology.
Weird.
Robin
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