The month of poetry is almost over, so I need to use a little more poetic license before my license expires.

Thanks to Rick for the link to this essay about the merits of traditional forms of poetry versus free verse.

Here’s a quick test for readers of poetry. Of the poems you can recite by heart, how many are in free verse and how many are in meter and rhyme? To revise Donald Justice’s formulation above, surely nine-tenths of the poems committed to memory last night and every night for millennia must have been in some kind of metered verse.

For Brianna’s benefit (and acknowledging that she is a very talented wordsmith), I want to make the distinction between contemporary and modern poetry. Like all labels, as I have been discussing recently, there are many variations within a particular genre or period of any art, though trends will stand out. Thus, generalizations have value: we live in what some have called a post-Christian age, yet current American society is considered one of the most -”churched” in the world. It is valid to note that generally there is a wide rejection of traditional Christian morality in our day, though we can also see pockets of revival in segments of the population. These trends will be reflected in art and culture.

Now that I’ve wishy-washily covered all my bases, here are a couple of essays for the diehard poetry aficionados. For those who wish my poetry affinity would die down, hang loose for a moment. The following is from The Fugitive, a poetry journal from Vanderbilt University in the early 20th century. John Crowe Ransom writes about “The Future of Poetry” in 1924, and Allen Tate replies. Their discussion concerns modern poetry, which for them was contemporary. From Tate:

Take the poor 19th Century in England: a community of faith, of aspiration (to be good even if a bit dishonest), of smuggery. What needed the poet but to re-state the self-evident amenities memorably, those categorical revelations common to all minds, immune to the blighting tentacle of scepticism? And so a Mr. Harold Nicholson tells us how Tennyson’s worst poems were then his best, that his messiahship undid him. We will credit no prophets. An individualistic intellectualism is the mood of our age. There is no common-to-all-truth; poetry has no longer back of it, ready for use momently, a harmonious firmament of stage-properties and sentiments which it was the pious office of the poets to set up at the dictation of a mysterious afflatus–Heaven, Hell, Duty, Olympus, Immortality, as the providential array of “themes”: the Modern poet of this generation has had no experience of these things, he has seen nothing even vaguely resembling them. He is grown so astute that he will be happy only in the obscure by-ways of his own perceptive processes; a priori utterance never escapes him. Claude Monet said: “The chief character in a group portrait is the light.” So the Modern poet might tell you that his only possible themes are the manifold projections and tangents of his own perception. It is the age of the Sophist.

If you have waded through those essays shaking your head, wondering if I will ever have done with this monotonous topic, I leave you with one of those trite Tennyson poems which will probably be committed to memory and recited by generations of homeschoolers to come. In honor of my friend Cindy, who has taken a blogging break, here it is:

Crossing the Bar
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

If you want to use this poem with your younguns, here’s a fine analysis of it.