Up for a surgical operation, you're wheeled into the operating theatre on a gurney and the anaesthetist does his stuff. As you go under, you hear the surgeon:

 'Who needs these boring old fashioned scalpels, artery forceps and sutures? Bring me Stanley knives, pipe grips, staple guns and string!'

Would this inspire confidence in the outcome of your operation? I suspect not. The tools of the surgeon's craft have been developed and refined by long practice until they've become the best for the job, and they work much better than any arbitrary substitutes. Yes, there have been cases in emergency when an appendix has been removed with a Bowie knife, but it's not the optimum approach for safety or success.

So why has a comparable position to our surgeon's been accepted without question in art? At the 'leading edge', painters long ago ceased to view the brush as the primary tool of their craft, substituting spray cans, bicycle tyres, animal tracks and even human bodies.1 Sculptors have taken to chainsaws and oxy-acetylene torches, and writers have thrown away pretty much all the long-established principles that make literature easy and worthwhile to read. While that's not as dangerous as our surgeon's position, the degradation of the results is cause for alarm, and it's particularly detrimental to poetry – in principle the most expressive and subtle form of literature.

Abandoning the tools that have been proven for centuries to yield expressiveness and subtlety in the name of free verse means both must be sought in other ways, but sadly many of the 'other ways' currently advocated don't really deliver. At worst, we've substituted contrivance for creativity: clever tricks for inspired choices – if for no other reason than the very limited range of choices we've left ourselves once we've abandoned everything deemed 'old fashioned'. But the problem with contrivances is that, while the contriver may fully appreciate their implications and nuances, others who weren't involved in the contriving probably won't, so our readers may well miss the point we're trying to make.

I'm no advocate for slavishly copying past practice. But I'm no advocate either for slavishly copying current fashions. The point here is to avoid being slavish to anything at all – to use the best tool for the job in hand whether it's 'out of date', fashionable or anything else other than the best choice, the sole criterion for that choice being whether it actually works for the reader. So free verse as currently defined, although it attracts a majority of current critical acclaim, may or may not be the best form to use depending on the message and expected readership or audience of our poem. And as a principle, if it's all the pundits allow us to use, it's not really free at all is it?

 [1] The Medicine Men, The Avengers, Series 3, Episode 9