Her Memory of the Picnic - Timothy Steele - Poem:

"This idyll will be, she intuits, brief;
The fabric of the family will tear.
Yet this can't change the bittersweet belief
That pleasure's no less true for being rare;
Nor can it wholly undermine her sense
That though well-muscled follies hound and press,
What counts most is her own intelligence,
However cramped by grief and loneliness."

I know, I should quote the whole poem! I don't really need to: the reader can follow my link to the complete text. I'm not even getting into the metrics here; what I find incredible is the failure of voice. The poet is imagining a teenage girl at a family picnic, but the language is not what she would use. "This idyll will be brief" "This pleasure is not less true for being rare." Or "these well-muscled follies are really hounding me today." "What counts most is my intelligence, however much it is cramped by grief and lonliness." I'm just not buying it.

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Update: Yes, I know it's an omnisicent narrator. That's the point: the narrative voice doesn't work here. It's a sort of "nobody voice" that doesn't get into the head of the character and make us believe she is really having these thoughts. We wouldn't accept this from a student in a fiction-writing workshop, why accept it from a poet? Let me invoke that "as well-written as prose" adage. This is not as well-written as a Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood novel. I personally think that Pound meant that poetry should be better written than prose. There really should be a higher standard, not a lower one. I'm still trying to picture those "well-muscled follies."

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New formalism tends toward a sort of sententiousness: abstract thoughts like "pleasure's no less true for being rare." Obviously if you like that sort of sententiousness, you will have no objections. I don't see why my dislike for it should be construed as an "inability to read metrical poetry" written after a certain date. It's not like there's some special decoder ring you have to get. I understand what Steele is trying to do: use standard devices of realistic fiction in a metrical context. I just think the entire sensibility is wretched. Not so much a failure of meter as of the "meter making argument."

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That abstract sententiousness has its roots in a particular view of human life. We might call it universalist kitsch. The idea that the Moslems, Jews, and Sikhs will appreciate his kitschy Xmas decorations because, after all, we all need some way of marking the Winter Solstice! According to this view, the most abstract formulation of the idea will be the most universally acceptable. Why, then, do I feel excluded from this universalism? It's not because I'm a marginal subject. I'm white, heterosexual, middle-class, and of Protestant origin.