A couple of points. In my college days, form following function was a big thing. To my mind, it was also a horrendous thing.

Wondering around Dusseldorf some years ago, the country having being bombed to smithereens during WWII, the square and barren buildings left me desolate.

The past week, I've been wondering around Valencia. Now and then, there is a marvellous building - the baroque palace of a Marquis being absolutely marvellous. Yesterday, looking at the art nouveau railway station, it wasn't as glorious, but it was still lovely.

For the most part, however, Valencia has been a great disappointment.

It is Andalusia - Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, Granada, etc. that sings to my heart. The architecture of the Moors uplifts one.

Alaine de Botton, once wrote a book entitled The Happiness of Architecture, in which he claimed that when we are surrounded by buildings without soul, it empties us and leaves us barren. I agreed.

After six months in the States, I already felt it. It took eleven years to leave, but I'm still glad to be happy in the old world.

Some months ago, my daughter and I were wondering around an art exhibition in Dublin, Ireland. My daughter mentioned that there was mastery, and there was self-expression, and it was mastery that took a lifetime to learn. Self-expression was cheap, and very often it was ugly and nasty. The Greeks had mastery. De Vinci and Michelangelo had mastery. Modern art is mostly pathetic - in my opinion, - of course. I'm not looking for meaning in art. I'm looking for beauty.

Until the advent of photography, art was about beauty. When a camera could pick up a likeness, painting a portrait or a scene became redundant, and so another reason had to be found for art. It became meaning and self-expression.

Today's poetry seems to be all about self-expression. It is ghastly. And, yes, of course, writing something with rhyme and metre can be extremely difficult, especially, if it is to reveal some forgotten truth or some profound insight. That requires mastery.

I'm trying to imagine what sort of editorial scrutiny people like Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, Charlotte Bronte, etc. had. They didn't. They wrote well. Mastery is a talent - it is innate. One is born with it. Yes, one has to learn the skills attached, but someone who has a natural talent does so with ease, and they reach peaks that those without it never can.

Bad writing, bad prose, etc. is not the result of a lack of editing (I spent a few years as an editor for two publishing houses in London). I also recall an editor of a national newspaper in South Africa telling me that editors can spot a writer within a paragraph of writing. Same thing happened when I was working in a publishing house.

When my daughter was 10 years old, I went to see her classes' art. My daughter's was an expression of the very best fine art - something that few could do. The rest were baby drawings.

When my sister put one foot on the dance floor (ballet) when she was six years old, her ballet teacher came to my mother and told her she was world class. The Royal Ballet examiner told my mother when my sister was 14 to audition for the Royal ballet.

Talent is born. Mastery is what results when one works at talent. Self-expression anyone can do.

So, no, the problem is not that poetry is restricted by following rhyme and metre - it is that it takes exceptional skill - mastery. And very few people are capable of it.

There are also other elements involved in the creation of poetry - that of being able to express a thought that few have considered or thought of. It's a sort of deep insight that few people develop - a combination of heightened intelligence, ruthless self-honestly, and keen observation.

When I listen to the music of Strauss, of John Williams, of Einaudi, of Tchaikovsky or Glenn Miller, my heart sings. The stuff that bands 'compose' today, with very few exceptions, makes my brain and heart despair. I have to get out of there, because otherwise my dancing state or my alpha/theta state would disengage with harmony.

I can't imagine what people see in people like Taylor Swift, or a thousand other artists. They most certainly don't have a voice, and their lyrics are childish, and so forth.

Things can certainly progress, but they can also go backwards, and what I see today is a retrogressive - not progressive.

Interestingly, good writing has a rhythm as well. It's what separates the writer from the wannabe, as does the ability to tell a story and write a sentence that emotes both wisdom and story.

"It was the best of times. It was the worst times." Or maybe Heinlein's well known paragraph, "“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I once had an English professor tell me the same thing you are telling me. I looked at him, quite blankly for a moment. Then I said nothing. What was there to say.

Another time, a professor of architecture told me that the business of architecture was all opinion, when I told him I couldn't stand modernism, and it was just an opinion - a bad 20th century opinion - that there was anything lovely about it. Again, I couldn't say anything.

Today, I would tell them both that lowering standards to meet the modern man does nothing for art. And there I rest my argument. :)

We differ, Mark. We always will. There are those who agree with me, and those who don't.

https://medium.com/born-to-write/poetry-nuclear-power-in-an-earthquake-zone-a5c0924c6f8c

https://medium.com/born-to-write/perfect-78aea435b525

https://medium.com/born-to-write/poetry-significance-b3343052d530

https://medium.com/born-to-write/my-poem-the-broken-soldier-and-the-healing-light-97084387b522

https://medium.com/born-to-write/poem-waking-up-to-war-a7ba043d6554