To focus on the phenomenon of musical silence is analogous to deliberately studying the spaces between trees in a forest: somewhat perverse at first, until one realizes that these spaces contribute to the perceived character of the forest itself, and enable us to speak coherently of 'dense' growth or 'sparse' vegetation. In other words, silence is not nothing. It is not the null set. Silence is experienced both as meaningful and as adhering to the sounding position of the musical object.

—Thomas Clifton, "The Poetics of Musical Silence"

In fact, the sounds of the poem are divided into two strains that are woven throughout the poem, like musical themes, echoing the two qualities of the subject. A combination of short (ĭ, ĕ) and high frequency (ē, ī) vowel sounds, along with liquid (r and l) and nasal consonants (m and n) provide an aural sense both of Jane's etherealness ("I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils") and of her energy ("the light syllables leaped for her"). In contrast, clusters of low, open vowel sounds (ō, ow, ooh), fricatives (s, sh, th), and stops (d, k, t, p) slow the poem down while suggesting Jane's seriousness and the depression she was prone to: "Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth . . ." As in the most sophisticated music, these two aural themes variously complement each other, contradict each other, and inevitably overlap.

God's Country is an irreverent farce, one that peels away the romantic whitewashing (pun intended) often given to depictions of the Old West—even depictions that think they are being irreverent. Everett's characters, more often than not, are smelly, boorish, and stupid. More importantly, they are narrow-minded, violent, racist, sexist, and self-righteously hypocritical. Everett masterfully balances coarse humor, a broad and penetrating social critique, and a sympathetic portrait of the far more complex Bubba, a black tracker who struggles to maintain his independence and dignity against this hostile cultural backdrop: “All I want is one day where I ain't got to worry about a white man decidin' I looked crosswise at him, one day where I ain't got to worry just 'cause I hear a rider behind me, one day where I ain't called a boy.” I was continually reminded of Mark Twain as I read this novel: it is that funny, and that smart.

Good "free verse" is really formal improvisation. The words interconnect and interact formally every bit as thoroughly as in the strictest sonnet. The difference is that no pattern of interaction, however partial, is set at the beginning—to allow for a greater richness of formal interaction, not a lesser, to allow (theoretically) for an even greater instrumentality of the language. The form of the poem is the way the poem tells the poet what it wants to be. . . . A poet may begin writing poems as program notes to his personality, and maybe they should always retain that early ardor of self-expression, but the best poets care about the poem as a made thing as much as about what it says, and to them the two are as inseparable as a word from its sound.
     —Michael Ryan, A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing (2000)

I have often told my students that the greatest risk in writing free verse is that the poet may end up having written only what she set out to write: the restrictions of closed forms (ideally, theoretically) force an intellectual and emotional engagement with the poet's ideas, as she must bend what she intended to say to fit the pre-determined form—the poet is forced to find new ways to say things, which results in saying (and learning—and sharing) new ideas. Ezra Pound wrote, "I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase." Either the content determines the outer shape of the poem (as a tree growing, in effect, from the inside out) or the content re-shapes itself—like water—to assume the shape of the vessel into which it is poured. In either case, the process is not (or is rarely, or should not be) at the conscious discretion [strike that: at the willful discretion] of the poet, and ideally the two—content and vessel, meaning and form, word and sound (or should that be sound and word?)—become indistinguishable.

My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.
     —Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found. 
     —William Wordsworth, "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room"