Wallace Stevens and the Iambic Line

from "Sunday Morning"
:

<<<
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

>>>

 

Is there a better example of the pentameter line in modern American poetry? The only real competition -- diferfent in every other way -- comes from Robert Frost. 

Comments

[Chris Canizarro]

He would have introduced the widow
and what she was wearing or not wearing
before telling you the time.

You cannot bore the reader with daybreak
and the threat fof snow.

There is poetry in "cho choo"
and in Little Italy.