Robert Frost once famously remarked that he regarded the practice of free verse as akin to playing tennis with the net down. The New Criterion has been publishing poetry since 1984. From the start, we have endeavored to assure that the nets on our courts were in good repair and stretched at regulation height. When we began publishing poetry, technical incompetence and what Brad Leithauser, writing in these pages, called “metrical illiteracy” reigned well-nigh supreme in most fashionable poetry circles. In part, this technical poverty was yet another unfortunate legacy of the 1960s: its attack on tradition and its ideology of untempered freedom naturally took aim at the metrical and formal heart of poetical achievement in English. If by 1980 there were few poets still insisting that writing in iambic pentameter was tantamount to abetting political repression, that was chiefly because such souvenirs from the Kulturkampf of the 1960 ...

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