Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century poetry. In this essay, he discusses “Supernatural Love” in the context of the acrimonious debate in the 1980s over the respective merits of free and formal verse.

In the 1980s, a virtual civil war broke out in America among those whose job it was to write and discuss poetry. The free-verse movement, which had gathered strength in the late 1950s as a rebellion against what it perceived as the lifeless academic poetry of the literary establishment, now felt compelled, having become an establishment itself, to defend its turf against the New Formalists. The acrimonious debate between those who favored “open” or “closed” poetic forms had political overtones. In a decade that was dominated politically by conservatism (the Reagan era), some advocates of free verse denounced the New Formalists as cultural and political conservatives...