Although “George Gray” looks like a poem—set in lines that clearly mimic how a poem should look—the poem itself is a radical, even revolutionary declaration of formal independence. For the writers of Masters’ generation, who came of age on the threshold of a new century, every established tenet of faith that had long defined the American culture was giving way. Within that tonic environment of change, writers such as Masters viewed the inherited poetic forms that insisted on recycling lame, idealistic cliches about love and God, family and country, as antiquated and even irresponsible. To them, the form of a poem should reflect its contents, its arguments, and its themes, rather than impose artificially-set forms onto those themes.

For Masters, the agony and joys of his small-town residents would not fit without irony into the grand architecture of traditional form. These residents could not share their painfully honest assessments into their own misspent lives in the tidy neatness of, say, a sonnet or a villanelle or a sestina. Such delightful and intricate patterning would only distract from the emotional depth of the residents’ difficult confessions.