I believe it was Eliot who said that the poets of the Victorian era tried to divorce sound from sentiment; in other words, they were writing poems that sounded very nice but didn't have any real meaning; words chosen only because they rhymed or fit on a certain meter. While I still see some of that today, I see a huge amount of the opposite; writing poems that have a great deal of meaning, but, quite frankly, just don't sound good. This is a trend both in amateur and proffesional poetry, I think. Eliminate unnecessary line breaks, and you might as well be writing an essay as a poem for much of the work you see on this site, and everywhere else, too.

Does it seem this way to anyone else, or is it just me? And does anyone else find it distasteful? I don't think that every line has to be specifically measured in a poem, and that every line has to rhyme with another, but totally ignoring rhyme and meter seems to be missing what makes poetry poetry.