Buttoned up or open neck?

In Competition 2819 you were invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse.
 
Auden was no fan of vers libre: ‘If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun.’ (D.H. Lawrence, he felt, was one of the few poets who could pull free verse off.) But there are those who question the designation ‘free’. The poet and critic Yvor Winters maintained that ‘the free verse that is really verse, the best, that is, of …Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound is the antithesis of free.’ And T.S. Eliot agreed with him. Last time this comp was run, the jury was split. This time round most of you came down on Auden’s side. The winners take £25 each; Alan Millard nabs £30.

Pace you who, scorning rules and reason,
Write rambling lines which neither scan nor rhyme.
Your scripts I scorn as literary treason,
Your verse I curse as pure, poetic crime.
You lack the pomp of Pope, the charm of Chaucer,
The marching rhythm of iambic feet,
In literature could anything be coarser
Than wild, meandering verse without a beat?
I justly would deserve the world’s rejection
If, disregarding measured, metric rules,
I ruined this, a poem of perfection,
With formless freedom only fit for fools
By writing, for example, a little line
Followed by a ludicrously long one that nobody
understands!
Oh no! Free verse I shun with all my heart
And with this closing couplet prove my art.
Alan Millard
 
— absent-minded like martinets (who don’t think
of anything
but action), they’re on a dawn patrol with a fez and
a fly-whisk,
hunting down layabout poems that missed the roll
call
because they were strolling
into experiment, somewhere unexpected:


they neglect their language, drive it out of pens
into an abattoir of form —
 
next poem (stunned), next poem (stunned), as the
carcasses
move overhead to be
drawn and quartered into verses,
to be learned lines as in detention, as in regiment,
as in morgue,
the cemetery of expression —
can’t hear the echo, the repetitions, the whole   breathlessness of breath.