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"How Glad I Am for Man, Tonight," is Walter Donway's second book of poetry. When his first book, "Touched By Its Rays," was published in 2008, it was acclaimed by readers and critics for raising the banner of the "great tradition" in English verse: the tradition that employs meter, rhyme, lyricism, and storytelling to create poetry that delights the ear and shuns the deliberate obscurity of so much poetry written today.
"How Glad I Am for Man, Tonight," carries forward the same banner. In his introduction, Donway writes:
"Free verse is the dogma, the orthodoxy, of contemporary poetry--in the journals, classrooms from elementary to college, poetry workshops, poetry slams...
"My conviction is that free verse represents a kind of esthetic nihilism (in most poets, not explicit, but merely absorbed) that dispenses with representation in the visual arts, with melody and tonality in music, and with plot in "serious" fiction. In each instance, the rebellion is against the defining characteristic of the art form.
"One consequence of the increasing domination of poetry by free verse for more than half a century, now, has been loss of the popular audience for poetry. This is not because audiences have been slow to adapt to new trends. The free-verse trend, by now, has far exceeded the span that earlier audiences needed to adjust to legitimate variations in an art form. No, the audiences for poetry, today, are not chiefly those who fell in love, perhaps in school, with Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, Arnold, Owen, and Frost. Those people hate poetry, today -- have given up on it."
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