Rhyme and unreason
From Mr Philip Hensher Sir: Much as one admires Michael Horovitz for not only reading and remembering a lot of aimless free verse about apple trees (Let- ters, 14 October), but also actually claiming to like the stuff, he's on to a bit of a loser enlisting the illustrious ancients to his cause. If he thinks that Beowulf is written in a free metre, he can't possibly have read it. The Psalms and Whitman's Leaves of Grass aren't free verse, any more than Blake's Terusakm is. Milton disapproved of rhyme, but nothing could be more strictly metrical than his verse. Keats wasn't arguing for vers libre when he recommended the appearance of spontane- ity. And Maya Angelou isn't a 'universally acknowledged "true voice of feeling" ' ; she is a harmless whitterer who never wrote a decent poem.
Anyone who has taught literature will have grown used to pupils claiming that anything which doesn't rhyme — a Hora- tian ode by Auden, Paradise Lost or a pas- sage of Shakespearean blank verse amounts to free verse, but I'd never thought to hear the proposition from a poet. Nothing in Horovitz's letter would be worth commenting on otherwise, and you have to ask: if he can't hear the metre in Ted Hughes, what is stopping him putting down any old rubbish and calling it poetry?
Philip Hensher
London SW8
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