🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2022-05-04 11:58 a.m., Michael Pendragon wrote:

This is something I enjoyed reading.

>
> I still remember the first time I was confronted with "modern" poetry (long before I ever dreamed of penning any poetry of my own), and my inability to understand how it was supposed to be the same literary form as the poetry I'd known and loved since early childhood.
>
> Poetry had always been defined as having rhyme and meter.

Not "always". Older poetry "Greek" to "Anglo-Saxon" had meter (in its
own fashion) but not rhyme. Rhyme (and our concept of meter) began in
Italy, and while English poets had been using it since Chaucer, it was
still quite controversial in the early Tudor period. So you can say it's
been around since "the beginning"

> Blank verse, which kept only meter, was a sub-division of poetry.

> But modern verse, which eliminates both the rhyme and the meter no longer has either of the defining characteristics of poetry.
>
> This does not in any way imply that modern verse is inferior (or superior) to poetry.  It is saying that they are two different literary forms.
>

> Unfortunately, by appropriating the name of "poetry" for itself, modern verse rendered traditional poetry obsolete.
>

The concept that's been lost isn't that of "poetry", but of "verse" --
literature written in meter. As evidence, here's the traditional concept
of verse, from PPP:
"A verse is formally a line of poetry written in meter. However, the
word has come to mean poetry in general (or sometimes even non-poetry)
written in lines of a regular metrical pattern."

And here's the public understanding of "verse", from Wikipedia:
"In the countable sense, a verse is formally a single metrical line in a
poetic composition. However, verse has come to represent any division or
grouping of words in a poetic composition, with groupings traditionally
having been referred to as stanzas."

The two different literary forms are poetry in verse (or "verse") and
poetry without verse ("open form"). But there's no line between them,
no; a poet can use both, even in the same poem. So there's a lot of
hybrid poetry as well. (The paradigm example is Eliot, who used rhyme
and meter, but not use in the normal way, mixing up his meters
willy-nilly and throwing in a lot of unrhymed lines in amongst the
rhymed ones.)

> If you look at any of the poetry journals at your library, you'll find that traditional (rhymed-metered) verse is nowhere to be found.
>
> Modern and traditional verse should have existed side-by-side, as related forms of literature  -- as they do in "A Year of Sundays."  However, in the academic and literary world, the former has entirely supplanted the latter.
>
> That readers still appreciate traditional can be determined by the fact that traditional poetry collections by Donne, Shakespeare, Keats, Poe, et al., are continuously in print.  Yet the academic prejudice for modern verse has blocked any new traditional poetry from being published -- effectively killing it as a literary form.
>

I think that has definitely changed, and again that's the internet. For
a while after WWII academics did successfully serve as gatekeepers: late
modernist poetry was nothing but 100 or so small journals, put out and
read by perhaps 10,000 people. But again, as I'd say, the internet
changed everything. Not only do today's poets have access to a vast
audience online; they even have self-publication, with the result that
the academics don't even have a monopoly in their totemic symbols, the
physical books and magazines.

> When I talk of metaphorically burning books (and/or poets) I am not speaking out of jealousy, but out of a desire to bring about a literary form of enantiodromia wherein traditional verse is re-established as poetry and modern verse is removed to its proper categorization of "poetic prose."
>
> Ideally, I would like both forms to co-exist -- but until such a time comes about, I shall continue to advocate the "burning" of texts, journals, and poetic forms that prevent traditional verse from flourishing.
>

No form of literature prevents another from flourishing. Elites (or
snobs) in one form may actively try to do so (and I think that little
poetics text I started this off with is a good example of that snobbery
and nothing but), but all that's needed is for the world to stop paying
attention to that. And that's what's happened to the erstwhile academic
gatekeepers over the last quarter-century.