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Buttoned Up or Open Neck?

A poem in conventional verse mocking free verse


Pace you who, scorning rules and reason,

Write rambling lines which neither scan nor rhyme.

Your scripts I scorn as literary treason,

Your verse I curse as pure, poetic crime.

You lack the pomp of Pope, the charm of Chaucer,

The marching rhythm of iambic feet,

In literature could anything be coarser

Than wild, meandering verse without a beat?

I justly would deserve the world’s rejection

If, disregarding measured, metric rules,

I ruined this, a poem of perfection,

With formless freedom only fit for fools

By writing, for example, a little line

Followed by a ludicrously long one that nobody understands!

Oh no! Free verse I shun with all my heart

And with this closing couplet prove my art.


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