THE MEANING OF MEASURE have been covering their nakedness with fig leaves of one sort of another. To fail to do so is to deny the reality of the Fall and therefore, childishly or sinfully, to deny either what we are as humans or the nature of the postlapsarian nature we now inhabit. Wilson simply assumes that mature humans realize they need clothing to define and dignify their public presence; he simply assumes that mature humans would be ashamed to appear in public without clothing. In the exceedingly strange reality of our increasingly neo-pagan twenty-first century, however, a growing number of adults do not share these assumptions: witness the growing number of patrons frequenting nude resorts, where they shamelessly cavort like unfallen creatures in the Garden of Eden. In his perceptive comparison of meter to clothing, Wilson in fact helps us realize that the impulses prompting the free-verse revolutionaries to throw aside meter are recognizably similar to those prompting today's patrons at nude resorts to discard their clothing. True, writing a free-verse poem hardly breaches our sense of human norms to the degree that appearing publicly nude does. But those who join the free-verse revolutionaries in programmatically-not just occasionally-rejecting meter as an element of poetry do resemble nudists in either childishly or willfully failing to recognize our need for clothing, broadly understood as any deliberately crafted external form giving external shape and form to our raw inner humanity. W hy do mature poets need meter? Why do mature humans need clothing? We need clothing to shield us from shame and to lift us from barbarism. Even Virginia Woolf-no great advocate of formalism in art-acknowledged that neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe nor Chaucer could have written their masterpieces 99