[Glenn Wright]

I suppose that like many ‘Sphereans who post on the Met board, my own poetic style leans toward Neo-Formalism. That said, I often write poems in free verse. As a young man my tastes in poetry were largely influenced by a couple of brilliant teachers who kindled in me a love of Classical and medieval literature. As I got older, I came to appreciate a more diverse collection of poets from many different schools and to form a list of poets I was less enthusiastic about.

Here are the qualities I most admire in poetry:
1. Sincerity—the sense of a real person speaking with controlled passion about something that is important to him or her. The reader is aware of encountering a powerful, memorable, complex personality. This quality is exemplified for me by the poems of Catullus, Shakespeare, and R. Browning.
2. Wit—the ability to use language like a virtuoso musician, showing the mastery of sound, nuance, irony, and image. Examples: Donne, Dylan Thomas, Larkin
3. Compression—tightness of construction, economy of expression, multum in parvo, using direct, precise words. Examples: Frost, Dickinson, Wilbur

Here are the qualities I least admire in poetry:
1. Originality—the rejection of tradition in the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. Often ignorance of tradition masquerades as originality. As Pope said, poetry should be “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Examples: Ezra Pound, Allan Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath
2. Opacity—the deliberate obfuscation of meaning in order either to create a puzzle for the reader or to serve as an admission test to sort out unworthy, uneducated readers. Neo-Classical poets often used obscure mythological allusions for this purpose. Wordsworth attacked the practice in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, saying that poetry should be written in “the language really spoken by men.” Examples: T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Wallace Stevens

Glenn