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At the end of A Season in Hell, where Rimbaud reaches autumn, where his boat turns toward the port of misery, where he surrenders his supernatural claims and knows he has only rough reality to embrace, he says, "It is necessary to be abso lutely modern." This is a little different from Ezra Pound's phrase, "Make it new," which suggests that a poem is a technical act, a thing controllable by the will. I have come to distrust discussions of poetry which are technical. Yet to approach what it might mean to be "absolutely modern" I need to touch on what appears to be a technical matter: the uses of form in English poetry?rhyme, meter, and stanza. 113 Criticism University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review www.jstor.org ® when the sound of the word on which a line ends does not limit the direction of the next line, when the voice does not subjugate speech, but conforms to its ir regular curves, to the terrain itself. Robert Frost said writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. It is an apt analogy, except that the poem is less like a game than like a journey, where there are so many real obstacles in the nature of the case that it would be a kind of evasion to invent additional, arbitrary, verbal ones.

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