I am thumbing through a great anthology of contemporary poetry, and it would seem that "the voice that is great within us" sounds within us mostly in a prose voice, albeit in the typography of poetry. Which is not to say it is prosaic or has no depths, which is not to say it is dead or dying, or not lovely or not beautiful or not well written or not witty and brave. It is very much alive, very well written, lovely, lively prose -- prose that stands without the crutches of punctuation, prose whose syntax is so clear it can be written all over the page, in open forms and open fields, and still be very clear, very dear prose...

...And the nightingales may still be singing near the Convent of the Sacred Heart, but we can hardly hear them in the city waste lands of T.S. Eliot, nor in his Four Quartets (which can't be played on any instrument and yet is the most beautiful prose of our time). Nor in the prose wastes of Ezra Pound's Cantos which aren't canti because they couldn't possibly be sung. Nor in the pangolin prose of Marianne Moore (who called her writing poetry for lack of anything better to call it). Nor in the great prose blank verse of Karl Shapiro's Essay on Rime, nor in the outer city speech of William Carlos Williams, in the flat-out speech of his Paterson. All of which is applauded by poetry professors and poetry reviewers in all the best places, none of whom will commit the original sin of saying some poet's poetry is prose in the typography of poetry -- just as the poet's friends will never tell him, just as the poet's editors will never say it -- the dumbest conspiracy of silence in the history of letters...