The Measured Chaos of Snyder’s Ecopoetic form

Abstract

Every significant poet struggles with the task of creating something that is new and completely of its time. The development of free verse and open form poetics is one of the most palpable examples of such a striving for innovation and is at the heart of many critical discussions concerning poetic creativity and aesthetics. Critics have argued whether poetry without metrical norms or an official form can even be considered poetry. There is debate whether verse or even language can truly be free and whether the term “free verse” implies a freedom from actual form or a freedom from conventional and established parameters of meter and rhyme; consequently, some poets and critics prefer the term open form. ¹ With the publication of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge set a precedent of experimentation with a more natural form that has yet to be surpassed in the magnitude of its influence on subsequent poetry. Yet many critics debate the validity of the claim that the development of an American open form poetic is the progeny, however indirectly, of British Romantic poetic ideals and aesthetics. Timothy Steele, in his examination of modern poetry and free verse, Missing Measures, asserts, with the twentieth-century modernists in mind, that Wordsworth “did not argue, as the modernists of this century did, that abandoning meter was a suitable means of reforming the faults of predecessors.” ²