Variations On Different Things

As a true master of pattern Hartkorn is also a master at free verse - not that formlessness which seems no more than limping prose but that magic music of true free verse, which seems in effect to have invented its own pattern. Reading his free verse one is never interrupted by such irrelevant wonderings as to why a line ends here rather than there; one knows that it ends at just the right place. Nor has he forgotten that music and meaning, sound and sense, are required in free verse as well as in patterned.