How Did Poetry Get Where It Is?

It’s been over a hundred years since French poets, and then their English counterparts, threw over, as a temporary exercise, the use of meter and rhyme. They complained that its romantic subjects (especially the Rose) and the idiotic sing-song way poetry was recited back then, were totally irrelevant to life. I would agree if I had lived back then.

World War I brought most romantic poets to complete despair. Ezra Pound and especially T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams captured poets’ imaginations, and every poet living today knows in a general way the rest of the story.

In the latter part of the 20th century, MFA style free verse, often filled with critical allusions only academics could catch, and often written more to elicit critical analysis from other academics than to give the ordinary reader pleasure, became the dominant mode for poetry.

Today poetry readers are a small minority of all readers. There may be, in fact, more poets than readers. The urge to make poetry is a deeply felt one we all experience as children but seem, for the most part, to “grow out of” by adulthood, when for most people, it becomes a “lost art.”

Timothy Steele has written, I think, the definitive work on the recent history of meter and rhyme, Missing Measures, subtitled “Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter.” It’s well-worth reading. In the meanwhile, I’d like to ask you who choose to comment a question or two:

Whatever happened, in your opinion, to meter and rhyme such that it could not, or has not yet, reasserted itself despite a tradition older than Shakespeare?

Why are so few people reading poetry today, including non-academic free verse?

I’ll share with you some ideas I have, in another posting. But first, let’s hear from you!

Leland