Arms and the Man I sing?

I like the elaborate structure of your poems, their classical, somewhat Romantic, feel. The feeling that you've put some work into their construction, thought about what you want to say and how best to say it, is becoming increasingly rare on poetry sites.

Thank you. I originally set this out as a sonnet (in iambic pentametre, no less!), but found myself at the conclusion before I'd reached the couplet, leaving it slightly truncated. Unfortunately, I cannot agree with your concluding assertion, however. Indeed, I would instead argue that the frequency with which thoroughly considered and crafted poetry finds its way onto the internet is, and has always been, fairly consistent. What creates the impression of its decline is the relative levels of... other... poetry that occupy the same space.

I see what you mean. Though I think when poetry sites first came about, the level of crafted, considered poesies was much higher than the levels of dross, but then they became popular, and so every single bleeding heart stuffed all the crevices with crap. That's the price the medium pays for gaining exposure, I guess. The more chances there are to express yourself online through verse, the more those chances will be used by people with nothing to express.

Perhaps, not so much nothing to express, but no aptitude for expressing it? Either way, I don't have a problem with bad poets; we were all one once. Its the overwhelming resistance to being taught things, and in doing so, improving, that vexes me. I'll never understand how people with such a professed lack of faith in their own writings skills can so vehemently refuse to shange their techniques or approaches. I've been trying to encourage the adoption of verse amongst various internet poetry outlets for as long as I can remember, and despite the central role verse plays in almost all recognised and celebrated poetry, people still believe that their determination to be "different" will outweigh the millenia of evidencethat suggests verse=good. Perhaps it's just hard to learn?

Yes, that's a better way of putting it. The stuff we express remains pretty much consistent - romantic and familial love, hatred, awe of nature etc. - but what varies is our perceptions and methods of saying how we feels about these things. By "verse," do you mean separate, structured stanzas with clear rhythms and so forth, as opposed to the more simple, free flowing forms? Reminds me of the introduction to Stephen Fry's famous book on poetry The Ode Less Travelled, where he lamented the modern mentality that "anything goes" where poesy is concerned. I often find that, when people say they want to be different, what they mean is that they want to be lazy, and just scribble down their thoughts without any regard for aesthetic, or how easy it is for their audience to read. They interpret free verse as meaning what Stephen Fry said, that "anything goes," when really, if you want to break away from the classical verse forms, you should at least think about pioneering new ones - like how ee cummings omitted all capital letters - as opposed to simply writing prose and then breaking it down.

When I say verse, I solely refer to the observation of your metre. But yes, it does, in sentiment, reflect my shared dismay at the laziness of poetry these days. While I'm not fanatical about form; as indeed you could tell from my submissions, which obey no strict established form, I very rarely encounter a piece of free-verse that I consider poetry, barring eastern forms (haikus and the such), for obvious reasons.

What's worse though, is the number of opportunities poets miss, and indeed, deprive themselves of, by not utilizing verse. Quite frequently, a metrical deviation or substitution is exactly the tool you need to employ to convey whatever mood or concept it is that you are writing on, which your syntax or lexis simply cannot reach.

I am under assumption that you are the previous commenter, though correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Now they're all you. How did you do that?

JohnnyPanic was a profile I was using whilst my old one, the one you see now, wasn't working properly, as a result of the recent overhaul that the Webmistress has made. Now my old profile works again, JohnnyPanic has been deactivated and all the usernames on his comments replaced with mine (man, now I'M getting confused!)
Regarding metre, I often try and establish a rhythm in my poems by reading a line aloud, and then reading it's successor, and if I don't trip or stumble then I judge it okay; sometimes I'll measure syllables, thought not a great deal. Have you ever read Charles Bukowski? By his own admission, he would start at the top of the page and just keep going until he reached the bottom, creating a somewhat slapshod effect now and then, but his work was still beautiful (at least in my opinion). Though he's the only one whose ever truly managed it, I reckon.
Yes, the occasional interruption of poetic rhythm can have quite startling effects; such as in poems by Thomas Hardy, who wasn't fond of verses which were too measured, with perfect musical patterns. The danger, I suppose, is that the seriousness of your content will be undermined by the happy-clappy gospel beat.

No, I've not read him. I shall have to look him up. Quite contrarily though, a rigid metre goes lengths to strengthening a poem of any tone. Take Blake's "The Tyger", or my own "Ruins and Remains for example; in both, the trochaic metre hammers the immediacy of the situation into the reader, moreso in Blake's, for the masculine endings, another metrical adaption. On the other hand, you have Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening", where the concluding couplets' phyrric termini relax the reader and draw a pensive, sombre conclusion.

Would it sound terrible if I told you that those metrical terms you referenced have me completely at a loss? I measure the rhythms of my work entirely by ear, though I've been trying to teach myself the different forms recently. Here's one of Bukowski's most popular pieces, as an example of his style: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Bukowski/168.

Seems to me like he'd be better off writing it in longer horizontal lines, using capital letters, and calling it prose. It's not bad prose, it's just harder to read when it goes further downwards than sideways. No, it wouldn't. Most allusions to metre fall on entirely deaf ears. Basically, metre is the poetically correct way (in occidental poetry, at least) of measuring out the rhythmns in verse. The act of doing so is called scansion, hence why lines can be described as "scanning well" if the metre is particularly fitting, or fluent. The basics consist of splitting a line of poetry into feet, each containing either two or three syllables. These feet can be (most commonly) iambic, which is an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable (as in "control"), a trochee, which is the opposite; stressed->unstressed (as in "patter"), a dactyl, which is stressed, unstressed, unstressed (as in "foolishly"), or an anapest, which is unstressed, unstressed, stressed (as in "mountaineer"). Less common feet are phyrric (unstressed, unstressed) and spondaic (stressed, stressed). Finding example words for these is very difficult, as they are rare, and almost all are repeat-syllables, like murmur, whose stress is relative to the surrounding syllables. The best way to tell if you've scanned a line correctly (which some people have trouble telling) is to try and read it with every syllable stressed the opposite of what you thought. If it sounds totally alien and absurd, you probably had them right in the first place. The principle advantages of metre are less overt than those of say, caesura or zeugma, but they subconciously affect the reader's impression of your poem nonetheless, and metrical tact is what usually sets the mediocre poets apart from the brilliant.

Thank you for teaching me the different metrical terms. Like I said, I measure my rhythms entirely by ear, so I could differentiate between stressed and unstressed syllables, and use them appropriately in a line, but I wasn't aware of those idioms. I'm not sure I agree that metrical tact separates the brilliant from the mediocre. On a technical level that may be true, but aesthetically (in terms of the words themselves and what they mean, as well as the feelings they convey) Bukowski's Nirvana is just as good as, say, Wordsworth's Daffodils. But that's just my opinion.

Aye, aesthetics don't tend to age well, which is an awful shame. I mean, I prefer S. T. Coleridge to Virgil any day, but even with only a GCSE in Latin, I could tell you that the quality of Virgil's poetry far exceeds Coleridge's. It's just aged so far that I can't appreciate it (though aged into a different language is probably something of an extreme case).

I really love the language used in this poem! So elegant and reminiscent of another time...