🚀 go-pugleaf

George J. Dance wrote:

> 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.

Well said G.D.....