Most modern poetry is unappealing to readers and listeners alike because it is so often obscure and difficult to follow. It is written in free verse (or prose-poetry as it should be more accurately called) — a hybrid form of writing which is neither prose nor poetry. By turning their backs on the traditional skills of poetry as old-fashioned and restrictive, the prose-poets like to boast that they are freeing themselves from the shackles of ‘formalism’. The result is the rambling complexity that characterises so much modern poetry. As Robert Frost famously once said: ‘Free verse is like playing tennis without a net.’. Too much of it is incomprehensible, when it should clearly communicate.
Why should prose-poets, or any poet for that matter, think that they are exempt from learning and practising a craft that has resulted in centuries of literary heritage? By all means adapt the diction or prosody to suit the temper of the time; but throwing the baby out with the bath water is wilful and self-defeating. (part of an article by Paul Gittins in Oxford Today, May 2015)
The Rhyme. (my comment on modern poetry)
Poets now despise the rhyme,
Or that’s the affectation.
But nonsense is as nonsense does
And what is worse than bad blank verse? –
Gibberish strung upon a line,
Conforming to the fashion?
The wish being father to the thought,
It’s promptly
Found
To be
Profound.
Rhymes outdated? That’s just rot!
Some can rhyme, and some can not.
It’s content, not the form, that counts,
And mastery of meaning.
A certain discipline of mind
Is requisite when using rhyme.
So don’t reject the tools at hand,
Misused as they may be.
The means can justify the end.
My point is penned.
Enough!
The End!
by the author of this blog
Back in 1964, C Day Lewis warned that modern poetry needed ‘aerating’, and he went on to suggest two solutions to make poetry more accessible. Firstly music, because if you ‘write words for a tune, you find the tune clears much of the verbal undergrowth’; and secondly recitation, ‘many people enjoy listening to poetry who seldom or never read it’.
A third solution would be to stop venerating poets as sages, as this inhibits criticism. A poet, after all, is no wiser than most other people. What he or she does have is a heightened sense of feeling and imagination, coupled with a practised skill in arranging words. ‘Poetry’ as Robert Graves said, ‘is the profession of private truth, supported by craftsmanship in the use of words’.
A more sceptical attitude to poets would also weed out the self-promoters and those who regard poetry as a form of psychotherapy, as in a recent number of the American magazine Poets and Writers which elicited such confessions from debut poets as ‘If I could write the poems … I could speak about my trauma’ or ‘I knew I had to write to break into that silence, disarm that solitude.’
I’m not a huge fan of contemporary poetry, but post 1945 stuff is good, such as Philip Larkin or RS Thomas. I’m a huge Blake fan, Robert Frost is good- my favourite is probably The Road not Taken but most people don’t know what it actually means! As a Brit I feel obliged to enjoy Kipling and Tennyson despite their imperialist views. Finally, my feminist side suggests Christina Rossetti.