The author also shows us how this interplay does not depend on form or meter. In Chapter 3, “Meter and Phrase,” she counters Frost’s famous line about free verse (“like playing tennis with the net down”) with an observation from Charles Wright: free verse is “the high wire act without the net.” Free verse lacks nothing essential. Form exists in free verse to the same degree as it does in formal poetry, and it is no solution to the challenges that face all poets: working the tools of language to make good poems. Through the work of D. H. Lawrence, Bryant demonstrates how to discern “large-scale phrasing;” Lawrence, especially, creates a “torrent” of words, almost too much to absorb – the whole phrase floods the reader. For example, in stanza 15 of “The Snake,” the lines move with increasing speed down the page:

This stanza has just the right blend of seduction and apprehension; the repetition of “slowly” empowers the snake while trapping the observer, who is unable to move. In “The Snake,” Lawrence gives each sentence a numbered stanza; some are very short, as in stanza 12: “I felt so honored,” and some, like stanza 15 above, contain several lines. The imposition of a pattern containing numbered stanzas of greatly varying length keeps the poem off-balance.

The English language has a distinct sound and pattern, and Voigt succinctly summarizes its charms and challenges with this sentence:

All the more impressive is the triumph of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, which begins: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state” (p. 54). It succeeds because it depends on a very flexible metrical landscape, what Voigt calls a “grid.” Its phrasing comes from Shakespeare’s mastery of spoken English’s syntactical structure, not from a rigid adherence to a strict iambic formula.

In Chapter 7, “Off the Grid,” another section of particular interest as a craft lesson, Voigt asks the essential question: do poets set out to create poems of such deliberate syntactical choices? Is all of this on purpose, or just accidental? The answer, it seems, is both. “The making of a poem is not a performance but an adventure, an act of discovery” (p. 121). Choices in writing are a combination of instinct and intention, influenced in no small part by the poet’s trained ear. The importance of sound and speech is clear enough in Frost’s poetry, but what about a poem like Lawrence’s “The Snake?” The author deciphers its code with just as much skill as she did Frost and Kunitz, though the effect is a bit dense due to the amount of explanation required. Even a poem as deliberately un-metrical, as self-consciously free of formal restraints as “The Snake” contains syntax, sound, and deliberate uses of lineation.

Voigt makes her most significant point near the end of the book:

In other words, poetry is in a state of evolution, which is natural, not revolutionary. Syntax in poetry creates lines that may or may not mimic human speech, but rhythm and line function essentially the same in poetry. The “ongoing spats” between formalists, experimental and traditional poets, seem irrelevant. Poetry will move ahead, spurred on by poets who continually test its boundaries, and by extension, expand the possibilities of language.