Poets on either side of the dispute become like the couple in Dance of Death , in love with our conflicts and misery, indeed depending on them . Fact is, one either uses the poetic palette developed over centuries, whether of prosody, figure, or form, or one does not. H istory rears its head. One of the things visible in English prosody is that it was not derived from one place. Disciples of W.C. Williams who hold structure, stanza, meter and foot as attributes of empirial British prosody are ignorant of its history.
English prosody is a multicultural artifact , growing out of a variety of sources.
The sonnet, the canzone, the ballade, in fact, most repetitive, stanzaic forms in English were derived from forms created in Arabic, whose meters were drawn from Latin and Greek. The blues form used by many contemporary poets is traceable to the Mississippi delta in the late 19th century. Most of the figures of speech were codified by Roman rhetoricians before the second century AD, and recapitulated and expanded by rhetoricians from the Middle Ages through the English renaissance. While some maintain that particular forms embrace specific content, exemplary literature suggests that content is a slippery issue in formal verse. The ballade form, often used now, as by Alfred Dorn and R.S. Gwynn, for irony, humor and satire was employed in France a thousand years ago as a memorizable form for storytelling about the Crusades.