Formal Poetry

April 21, 2008

[photo of Keats' Tombstone by Carlo Tancredi]

A comment at lunch today that made me realize I don’t talk much about formal or classic poetry. Reading this blog gives the impression that my poetic interests lie with a relatively narrow band of contemporary and free verse. It’s actually quite the opposite!

The poetry that I count on and come back to most– the poetry that has been with me since the beginning– is almost all formal. The few poems that I have memorized and never forgotten are formal poems. If I had to list "favorite poets" generically, then the Top 10 might not have any free verse poets at all.

I resist that kind of disordered listing because while all the different poems I like fit in the very broad rubric of poetry, I believe that for the most part, English poets through the Victorian era were engaged in a fundamentally different project from the Romantics and their ilk… who were themselves engaged in a project more different than similar to the poetic renaissance of the 50s and what has come from them.

Good new formal poetry still appears occasionally, but its time has passed in the same way that good straight-ahead and bop-ish jazz musicians still emerge despite the heyday of that music being over and the context mostly forgotten. I realize that this is partially the same argument made against the "School of Quietude"– an argument I respect but can’t share.

It’s quite possible that my attachment to these earlier formal poets is a sign of critical weakness and insufficient acumen, that I’m stuck in the past, and/or that I’ve just never matured as a reader. I don’t worry much about it. If someone feels they’ve gotten all they can from a classic poem and "moves on" from them, that’s OK by me. I feel like the lucky one!

I haven’t posted a lot of formal poems here or talked about them because I’ve assumed that a lot of it goes without saying. Most of the poems are readily available… and I may be discovering new things about them, but they are not necessarily new to anyone else. I may not talk a lot about them, but I may post from that pool more often.

Tags: formal poetry, poetics, poetry