Robert Frost once famously remarked that he regarded the practice of
free verse as akin to playing tennis with the net down. The New
Criterion has been publishing poetry since 1984. From the start,
we have endeavored to assure that the nets on our courts were in good
repair and stretched at regulation height. When we began publishing
poetry, technical incompetence and what Brad Leithauser, writing in
these pages, called “metrical illiteracy” reigned well-nigh supreme
in most fashionable poetry circles. In part, this technical poverty
was yet another unfortunate legacy of the 1960s:
its attack on
tradition and its ideology of untempered freedom naturally took aim at
the metrical and formal heart of
poetical achievement in English. If by 1980 there were few poets still
insisting that writing in iambic pentameter was tantamount to
abetting political repression, that was chiefly because such
souvenirs from the Kulturkampf of the 1960s had already done their
damage. Readers interested in current examples of the wreckage will wish to
peruse the damage report that John Simon furnishes in his review of
the 1996 edition of The Best American Poetry in this issue.

Mr. Simon concludes his essay on a melancholy note, wondering
whether poetry has come to “the end of its tether” and whether
“all, or almost all, poems have been written.” Certainly, there
are ample grounds for concern. The performance of most of the poets
in the volume that Mr. Simon reviews—which alternates mostly
between pseudo-vatic bilge and adolescent politicized whining—is an
incentive to despair. Nevertheless, we firmly believe that “the end
of poetry” is no more upon us than its much ballyhooed cousins, “the
end of art” and “the end of history”: all seem obstinately
persistent notwithstanding the dire proclamations of their would-be
coroners.

If we are cautiously optimistic about the future of poetry, it is partly
because we have over the years managed to attract so many talented
poets—both new and established—
whose work forms an effective
antidote to such
pessimism. Daniel Mark Epstein, Dana Gioia, Rachel Hadas, Donald
Hall, Donald Justice, Jane Kenyon, Brad Leithauser, Frederick
Morgan, Herbert Morris, Mary Jo Salter,
Elizabeth Spires,
Timothy Steele: the work of these and other poets who have appeared
in The New Criterion testifies to a continuing resiliency in at
least some strains of contemporary poetry.

Different as these poets are from one another, what they have in
common is an abiding scrupulousness about poetic meter and poetic
form. In helping to raise the banner of what has come to be called
“the new formalism” in poetry, The New Criterion has—in the
poetry and the criticism of poetry it has published—played a
significant role in fostering a return to seriousness in this realm
of cultural endeavor. Our achievements in this regard have been
widely recognized by friends and enemies alike, and have been
celebrated or disparaged accordingly.

It was with as much surprise
as gratitude, then, that we found The New Criterion singled out in
the latest volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature,
which is devoted to “Poetry and Criticism 1940–1995.”
The general editor of the entire history is Professor Sacvan Bercovitch
of Harvard University, a longtime radical who whose name, “Sacvan,” was
given to him by his Communist parents to commemorate the “martyrdom”
of Sacco and Vanzetti. Nevertheless, in a section on “Poetry,
Politics, and Intellectuals,” written by Robert von Hallberg,
Professor of German at the University of Chicago, the “new
formalism” promulgated by The New Criterion is identified as an
influential force in contemporary poetry and criticism of poetry
that stands in opposition to “the intellectual ascendancy of the
Left since the 1960s.” Professor Hallberg goes on to observe that
“no journal of the Left or Center has made a similar commitment” to
serious coverage of the arts.

Of course, we are inclined to agree. But it remains to note
that, in championing formal poetry, The New Criterion has intended
to advocate not an airless aestheticism but a view of poetry—and of
cultural endeavor generally—that recognizes the deep connection
between formal excellence and artistic potency. Indeed, it is in
this sense that The New Criterion is a partisan of “tradition.”
As T. S. Eliot noted in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
tradition is more than just a repetition or “handing down” of the past.
“Tradition,” he wrote,

is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and
if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in
the first place, the historical sense; … and the historical
sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence… . This historical sense, which is a sense
of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and
of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it
is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of
his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

Thus the cardinal artistic truth—only seemingly paradoxical—that
the most genuinely individual artist is also the one who has most
assimilated himself to tradition. The formal resources of any art
are the most tangible tokens of its spiritual itinerary. Which is
why, to quote Frost again, the “figure a poem makes” “begins in
delight and ends in wisdom.”