Revive the Romantics and invigorate contemporary poetry

Few poets since William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg have gained the reputation that poets used to enjoy. Often, critics place the blame for this on a dearth of creativity in recent generations. But instead of drawing such a conclusion, the problem may instead be that contemporary poetry is simply weakened by changing conceptions of the definition of art.

Romantic poetry focused highly on meter and, to a lesser degree, rhyme. Shakespeare used metered rhyme in his love poetry, as did Alexander Pope in his satire. Blank verse was standard for English epics like Milton’s Paradise Lost. Poetry was judged not only by the author’s skill in using words and invoking emotion, but also by his ability to properly employ formal structures. Free verse was an unfamiliar concept at this time.

Walt Whitman was one of the first poets to become famous for free verse. With the help of Emily Dickinson’s popularity, a newer culture of poetry began to develop, straying from the strict formalism of the past. This continued with later poets, like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Robert Frost is a unique character in this movement—he applied strict formalism to the lyric styles of Whitman and Dickinson. Nevertheless, free verse continued to march forward and displaced formalism, culminating with the work of E.E. Cummings, who ignored not only poetic rules but grammatical ones as well.

Poetry thus began to be prized foremost for its originality. Poets scorned traditional subjects, such as nature and love, and placed value on new, less conventional words and images. Above all, free verse allowed for the constant formation of new poetic structures, in place of the limits in meter and rhyme of the past. With such a plurality of forms, however, poetry began to lose its distinctiveness and, to some, its meaning as art. More pieces of writing could be considered poetry, and judgment of them thus became less objective. Without poetic conventions against which to measure a poem, each poem’s meaning became almost entirely up to the reader.

This is not to say that all free verse poetry is bad—Whitman and Williams are celebrated for a reason, after all. Free verse poetry is difficult to write well, since the only organizational tool for the author to use is the line breaks. Poets of the post-modern era, in their fascination for free verse, have forced themselves into the most difficult style of poetry to write.

Unfortunately, the love of free verse has lessened the appreciation of more traditional poetry. Outside of a literature class, very few of my classmates read and enjoy poetry. According to the American Academy of Poets, “very few poets rely entirely on the proceeds from their work … Most poets, even the most widely published, hold other jobs,” such as teaching or journalism. These societal changes caused a dwindling in famous poets, but not necessarily a lack of creativity. Inordinate desire for free verse and fewer incentives for writing good poetry have combined to cool the fervor of potential writers.

Perhaps the literary world has moved beyond formal poetry, and I am a mere traditionalist stuck in the past. Remember, however, the many revivals throughout literary history—the Renaissance revived the classics, the nineteenth century revived Celtic literature, and the twentieth revived Irish literature. In light of the past, a revival of Romanticism is certainly possible in the 21st century. Contemporary poets should draw from Classical and Romantic poetry, in addition to Modernist poetry, though more moderately. Melding both the new and the old, as Robert Frost did, is the only way to channel this generation’s creativity into original poetry and move the art form forward as a medium.