3 FEBRUARY 1990, Page 31

Once

'Verse in the 20th cent, has largely escaped the straitjacket of traditional metrics.' The Oxford Companion to English

Literature, fifth ed.

Once, to a woman and a man, Poets wrote stuff that you could scan.

Straitjacketed to rules, they thus Produced verse risible to us — The Iliad, Oedipus, Twelfth Night, And 'There's a certain slant of light.'

Poor fools, all mad and middlebrow. We write so much better now.

Timothy Steele