Gryphos
Auror
Warning: rant.
I love poetry; I think it's amazing. Because I'm so damn extra, I've written down some of my favourite lines of poems and stuck them on the wall over my desk. I'm not some kind of poem connoisseur or anything (in fact, I'm not particularly well read at all), but I know what I like. I love the poignant statements of William Blake and the way Robert Browning's dramatic monologues ooze personality and characterisation, and I think that Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven exhibits some of the dopest rhythmical control I've ever seen.
So yeah, I love a good poem, and for a while now I've been trying to get into more modern poetry. However, this forced me to come to something of an unfortunate realisation:
IMHO, most modern poetry is shit.
It really pains me to say this; I hate the idea of being an edgy hipster singing wishing for a return of the 'good old days', but I can't help it! I've tried to analyse why it is modern poetry hasn't connected with me, and I've come to the conclusion that the problem is that modern poetry (tends to) lack two important aspects: musicality and imagination.
Originally, poems were performed to music, and while this tradition disappeared, it left a legacy of musicality to the art of poetry. Poems, as aesthetic objects, had pleasing rhythms, constructed mainly using rhyme and metre:
I wonder do you feel today [A]
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray [A]
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May? [A]
(Robert Browning — Two in the Campagna)
Beautiful. And yet, around the early 20th century, this lyricism began to wane in popularity as Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Mina Loy dedicated themselves to all but totally abandoning metre and rhyme (I'm not saying the Modernists were the first to write unmetred or unrhyming poems, but they did make it the norm). There have certainly been noteworthy poets since then who used rhyme (Philip Larkin, for instance), but in general, poems have lost focus on musicality.
Now, I'm not saying that all poems need to rhyme or have metre. What I am saying is that good poems should. Because what these rhythmic devices vitally achieve is making the poem memorable. There's a reason why 'Tyger tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night' is one of the most well-known lines of poetry, and why I've yet to meet a single person who can recite the first two lines of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land off the top of their head, despite that arguably being the more historically significant poem. To be effective, poems need to stick with the reader; the words themselves need to be pleasing to recite. It's the same logic that goes into advertisement jingles. Critics of metre and rhyme often argue that they constrict the creativity of the poet, and to this I vehemently disagree. In fact, I would argue that restrictions such as metrical and rhyming patterns prompt more creativity, since they force the poet to come up with new and interesting ways of saying what they want to say.
Now, as for the second thing modern poetry tends to lack, imagination. This observation is harder for me to quantify or explain, but I just feel like there's a distinct lack of ... I'm not sure ... fantasy? Storytelling? Range of subject matter? Again, I can't really quantify it. But, where are the poems about a duke showing a portrait of his deceased wife, only to casually reveal that he was the one who had her killed (My Last Duchess)? Where are the poems about a grief-stricken widower being harassed by a raven (The Raven)? Where are the poems about discovering the ruins of an ancient statue and ruminating on the insignificance of great empires in the grand scheme of things (Ozymandias)? Where are the poems using the tiger as a symbolic representation of evil and questioning how a benevolent god could create such a fearsome creature (The Tyger)? You get the idea. Modern poetry is direct, which would be fine, if not done to the point of blandness. Nowhere is this more plainly exhibited than so-called poetry slams, where 95% of the poems consist of either self-indulgent commentary or preaching about identity politics. Now, I love me some interesting political discourse in poetry (pretty much everything William Blake wrote was hella political), and I'm of the opinion that art is inherently political in nature whether or not the author intends it. But when a poem literally just consists of a poet spouting rhetoric (in an obnoxious cadence — let's not forget that), I have to ask, what am I supposed to get from this? These same messages have been put forth countless times before far more eloquently. If you're going to say the same thing, at least try to say it in a new and interesting way.
But yeah, sorry about the rant. This is just a topic I feel very strongly about. I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way, that poetry has lost what made it great. If anyone knows of any modern poets who do make good use of rhyme and metre, and use creative images to put forth interesting themes, please go ahead and point them out.
I love poetry; I think it's amazing. Because I'm so damn extra, I've written down some of my favourite lines of poems and stuck them on the wall over my desk. I'm not some kind of poem connoisseur or anything (in fact, I'm not particularly well read at all), but I know what I like. I love the poignant statements of William Blake and the way Robert Browning's dramatic monologues ooze personality and characterisation, and I think that Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven exhibits some of the dopest rhythmical control I've ever seen.
So yeah, I love a good poem, and for a while now I've been trying to get into more modern poetry. However, this forced me to come to something of an unfortunate realisation:
IMHO, most modern poetry is shit.
It really pains me to say this; I hate the idea of being an edgy hipster singing wishing for a return of the 'good old days', but I can't help it! I've tried to analyse why it is modern poetry hasn't connected with me, and I've come to the conclusion that the problem is that modern poetry (tends to) lack two important aspects: musicality and imagination.
Originally, poems were performed to music, and while this tradition disappeared, it left a legacy of musicality to the art of poetry. Poems, as aesthetic objects, had pleasing rhythms, constructed mainly using rhyme and metre:
I wonder do you feel today [A]
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray [A]
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May? [A]
(Robert Browning — Two in the Campagna)
Beautiful. And yet, around the early 20th century, this lyricism began to wane in popularity as Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Mina Loy dedicated themselves to all but totally abandoning metre and rhyme (I'm not saying the Modernists were the first to write unmetred or unrhyming poems, but they did make it the norm). There have certainly been noteworthy poets since then who used rhyme (Philip Larkin, for instance), but in general, poems have lost focus on musicality.
Now, I'm not saying that all poems need to rhyme or have metre. What I am saying is that good poems should. Because what these rhythmic devices vitally achieve is making the poem memorable. There's a reason why 'Tyger tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night' is one of the most well-known lines of poetry, and why I've yet to meet a single person who can recite the first two lines of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land off the top of their head, despite that arguably being the more historically significant poem. To be effective, poems need to stick with the reader; the words themselves need to be pleasing to recite. It's the same logic that goes into advertisement jingles. Critics of metre and rhyme often argue that they constrict the creativity of the poet, and to this I vehemently disagree. In fact, I would argue that restrictions such as metrical and rhyming patterns prompt more creativity, since they force the poet to come up with new and interesting ways of saying what they want to say.
Now, as for the second thing modern poetry tends to lack, imagination. This observation is harder for me to quantify or explain, but I just feel like there's a distinct lack of ... I'm not sure ... fantasy? Storytelling? Range of subject matter? Again, I can't really quantify it. But, where are the poems about a duke showing a portrait of his deceased wife, only to casually reveal that he was the one who had her killed (My Last Duchess)? Where are the poems about a grief-stricken widower being harassed by a raven (The Raven)? Where are the poems about discovering the ruins of an ancient statue and ruminating on the insignificance of great empires in the grand scheme of things (Ozymandias)? Where are the poems using the tiger as a symbolic representation of evil and questioning how a benevolent god could create such a fearsome creature (The Tyger)? You get the idea. Modern poetry is direct, which would be fine, if not done to the point of blandness. Nowhere is this more plainly exhibited than so-called poetry slams, where 95% of the poems consist of either self-indulgent commentary or preaching about identity politics. Now, I love me some interesting political discourse in poetry (pretty much everything William Blake wrote was hella political), and I'm of the opinion that art is inherently political in nature whether or not the author intends it. But when a poem literally just consists of a poet spouting rhetoric (in an obnoxious cadence — let's not forget that), I have to ask, what am I supposed to get from this? These same messages have been put forth countless times before far more eloquently. If you're going to say the same thing, at least try to say it in a new and interesting way.
But yeah, sorry about the rant. This is just a topic I feel very strongly about. I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way, that poetry has lost what made it great. If anyone knows of any modern poets who do make good use of rhyme and metre, and use creative images to put forth interesting themes, please go ahead and point them out.