Metric verse sticks in the mind. If “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” isn’t lodged in your memory, something else iambic is: “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” or “to be or not to be.” But there are other means to this end. Donald Justice observed that “any ornament assists the recollection to some degree”: repetition or rhyme; parallelism, or just “fine and exact phrasing.” Anyway, the “purely mnemonic character of a passage contributes very little to its aesthetic power.”
If meter makes reading poetry easier, it makes the writing harder: it offers “a certain resistance to the writer’s effort to call up his subject,” “like the stone of the sculptor.” This resistance may not be bad. A poet’s efforts, blocked, may be redirected in a more fruitful direction. But like the first, this second observation tells us little about meter’s “aesthetic power.”
Some say, in this free-verse age, that meter is an aesthetic defect: no one talks in iambic pentameter, and the language of poetry should be the language of real conversation. Justice will have none of this:
to object to the meters as unnatural because unrealistic is to miss the point. Like the odd mustaches and baggy pants of the old comedians, they put us on notice that we are at a certain distance from the normal rules and expectations of life. The effect has been variously called a distancing or a framing.
Justice quotes Wordsworth: metric writing serves “to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition.” Don’t ask me what that means. And surely this is no essential effect of meter: In Robert Frost’s own account, he aimed to get, and often succeeded in getting, “the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation” into “strained relation” with the “regular preestablished accent and measure of blank verse.” Frost’s The Death of the Hired Man starts “Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table / Waiting for Warren”: no baggy pants here.
Metric verse also seems, to Justice, “to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable it may have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable.” If you can later recall, and then express, an emotion in metric verse, you must to some degree have mastered it; you were not left speechless and at its mercy. If this is meant as a claim about meter’s aesthetic power, the power is an extrinsic one: the virtue is not in the verse’s perceptible rhythm, but in something that the rhythm is a distant sign of. Justice acknowledges as much when he says that “the very act of writing at all” implies “an attempt to master the subject well enough to understand it”; meter just “reinforces” this impression already given by other features of the act.
A final idea about the aesthetic power of meter surfaces at the end of Justice’s meditation. Meter casts over the words of a poem
the illusion of a necessary or at least not inappropriate fitness and order. There is a kind of accrediting in the process, a warrant that things are being remembered right and set down right.
“Remembered right” can be read in two ways. The first says that a poem in meter strikes us as a more accurate report of some real event. That’s a silly suggestion, and obviously false. More plausible is that metric verse strikes us as putting its subject as it should be put, where this “should” is the should of aesthetic, rather than alethic (truth-related) requirement. In metric verse the word stresses are in the right or fitting place, and in this way metric verse is, simply, beautiful, and is therefore an appropriate medium for things that, in their poetic presentation, are to be made beautiful.
See also Sugar-Coated Pills; Meter and Rhyme—Defended?; and Dana Gioia on the New Formalism.
Perhaps the opaque/transparent distinction is helpful here. Meter allows us to enter into the dream of the poem, a more instinctive, imaginative place…
I think that is precisely why jazz works: like metre, the jazz standards, for example, are the stricture without which the emotional content would not flourish meaningfully. (Much jazz is remarkably conservative in that respect, happily.)