What I am going to say now is not going to be very popular with some people, but it needs to be said. I'm not one of those neo-formalist dogmatists who would insist that there is no such thing as good free verse poetry. There has been plenty of wonderful free verse poetry, although there has also been a vast amount of prosaic garbage.

However, I've heard the statement made by several free-verse poets that they didn't like any rhymed or metrical poetry whatsoever, and that they didn't like any poetry written before the free verse revolution began.

This is not just hogwash, it's more like heresy. The entire tradition of English-language verse is metrical up until the late 19^th century. Much of it is rhymed. Rejecting that entire tradition and all of the great poetry produced by that tradition in favor of some ideological stance is just sheer nonsense. In taking such a position, you're also rejecting all of the poetic tradition of classical China, the traditions of Celtic poetry, the song-poetry traditions. Poetry in the United States has become a dry, dull and academic type of literature, cut off from everyone except a tiny intellectual elite. That elite needs to hear the truth: if you don't like rhymed and metered poetry, you don't like poetry in the first place.

There has been a formalist revival in recent years, but it too often seems to buy into the same dryly academic tone as its free-verse equivalent, despite being written in traditional poetic structures. If poetry is ever going to speak to the majority of people again the way it used to, it needs to get a lot more musical and a lot more personal.