"Contrived" has always been one of the most damning epithets that can be applied to a poem. A history of hostile reactions to innovative writing would show that objection is usually taken not just to its imagined "ugliness", "disorder" or "obscurity", but to its "calculated ugliness", its "deliberate disorder", its "wilful obscurity". And when the pejoratives of mental predetermination are exhausted, critics reach instead for the pejoratives of physical exertion: "forced", "laboured", "strained", "overworked". There is little evidence that critics, or indeed poets, of today think any differently from their predecessors; three-quarters of a century later Yeats's sentiments in "Adam's Curse" are still largely accepted:

I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.'

It seems odd, though, that we should take the view that Yeats did. What he meant by a contrived poem was a poem that fails to conceal the effort involved in its making. But since Yeats we have become used-in fiction, in drama, in film-to the foregrounding of artistic process. We have learnt to value works which break the illusion of reality and remind us that they have been made. The suggestion that poems should conceal the evidence of the work that has gone into them, of the sources from which they were drawn, and of the genres to which they belong, might be seen as little more than ...