Formal Friday: Why Be Formal?

In Tobias Wolff's Old School, which is a terrific short novel about a prep school and writing, Robert Frost appears as a character. So does Ayn Rand, and she's a tiresome bitch, as you'd expect. Frost seems fairly likable in Old School, but my husband tells me he was kind of mean.

Anyway, in the book, a kid questions Frost's use of traditional form, asking "whether such a rigidly formal arrangement of language is adequate to express the modern consciousness." Frost asks the boy what he means by modern consciousness, dismisses his half-baked answer, and talks about a poem he wrote for his friend who died in WWI. "Would you honor your own friend by putting words down anyhow, just as they come to you--with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of the sound, the sound of their meaning? Would that give a true account of the loss?" He goes on to talk about Homer's The Iliad:

"I am thinking of Achilles' grief. That famous, terrible grief. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry...No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry."

I assume the fictional Frost would feel that form also gives other emotions more heft.

I thought I'd list a few pros and cons of formal poetry, or more specifically, poetry that uses a regular scheme of rhyme, and/or meter, and/or repetition. See what you think!

PROS

It makes the poem more memorable. Something that rhymes, especially, is more likely to stick in people's heads. That's why "red sky at night, sailor's delight" is easy for me to remember, while I can never recall whether you're supposed to feed a cold or a fever (I feed both), even though I get colds almost every winter and I've never sailed a boat. I don't even want to get on a boat. I'd get seasick.

It can make the poem sound more convincing. For some reason, something that rhymes and meters feels inevitable. This is really helpful for a poem when you're making some kind of argument. I said "can" though, because if the poem is written badly and has forced word choices, the form actually gets in the way of being persuasive.

NEITHER PRO NOR CON

It gets you out of yourself. The form can work against your obsessions, usual thought patterns, and habitual word choices. Not everyone thinks this is a benefit, but I do.

It's not exactly the same as inviting the element of chance into your creative process. I get the sense that there is a hidden logic behind which words rhyme that lead me to new insights that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

And now you're probably making fun of me in your head. Whatever. You're the one sitting around reading a poetry blog.

CONS

It's harder to write than free verse (for me, anyway.) It's especially harder to write well and make the language sound effortless. If you're trying to approximate natural speech, that's even more difficult. The places where you've made compromises in order to accommodate the form can be very obvious.

Actually, that's the only con I can think of, except that some people think traditional form is passe. There are also people who think traditional form is more impressive. I don't know what the prevailing opinion is there.