Poetry Then and Now

Poetry Then and Now

There is a dichotomy in American poetry. There is the “free verse revolution” of the Walt Whitman heritage espousing the William Carlos Williams’ search for a “new measure” which sounds American rather than European and Ezra Pound’s “make it new,” and there is the “conservatism” of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s metrical poetry and Robert Frost‘s criticism of free verse as “playing tennis with the net down.”

So we have the “free verse revolution” (which has become the establishment for the past 50 years) of Whitman, Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Wakoski, et al, e.g. 99% of the poets; and the “conservatism” of Longfellow and Frost, et al, e.g. to a lesser extent Howard Nemerov, John Hollander, C. K. Williams, and Dana Gioia.

Then there are “The New Formalists” who write in the conservative metrical form, but are liberal politically, and also write free verse. It takes more than the metrical form to be conservative and so the movement has fizzled. The country is looking for formal poets who are conservative politically. Poets that have the courage and vision to be “major” poets, not just political hacks.