[Nick McRae]

A number of months back I picked up a copy of A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch, which offers a comprehensive look at pretty much everything related to poetry (I highly recommend picking it up).

The title has got me thinking about schools and styles of poetry in a way I haven't before, and I thought that'd make for an interesting discussion point. I'll jump right in and provide a few leading questions:

- do any particular schools of poetry resonate with you?
- do you consider your poetry to belong to a specific school or style?

I would say that symbolism is the school that resonates with me the most. From Hirsch's title:

They craved a poetry of suggestion rather than direct statement and treated everything in the external world as a condition of soul. They sought to repress or obfuscate one kind of reality, the quotidian world, in order to attain a more permanent reality, a world of ideal forms and essences. They believed that a magical suggestiveness could best be achieved by synaesthesia, fusing images and senses, and bringing poetry as close as possible to music.

I'd never studied symbolism too closely, but the above feels like it aligns with what I'm trying to do for the most part.

[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

[Julie Steiner]

[Edited to add that it's nice to see you around the 'Sphere again, Nick.]

I was just listening to a few of Alice Allan's excellent "Poetry Says" podcasts from last year, and in one of them she mentioned a move from thinking of poetic lineages to thinking of poetic affinities. (She attributed this shift to someone, but I've forgotten who.)

I might extend that attitude to schools as well. In order to claim that a poet was in another poet's school/circle/lineage, one must plausibly demonstrate that the work of one poet influenced the work of another. But anyone is free to claim to recognize "affinities" between one poet and another. Maybe they were both from working class backgrounds, or both spent time in the military, or both were mothers, or both loved a good slant rhyme, or whatever, even if they never encountered each other's work. If you think they employ themes and/or techniques that resonate with each other, it's fair game to say so. I also like the notion that I can claim that my own work has certain affinities with New Formalism, etc., without my having to pledge my loyalty the whole New Formalist manifesto (not that there ever really was one, but still).

Glenn, I agree with much of what you say, but in context it looks as if you might be suggesting that Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath were ignorant of tradition. I think all three of those were well aware of the traditional norms that they were choosing to transgress.

Pound's many excellent formal verse translations show an impressively nuanced grasp of rhyme and meter, at least in the languages I am able to judge. I'm not a fan of his other work, and certainly not of his politics, but I have the highest respect for his graceful translations from French and Provençal in particular.

Ginsberg attributed his initial interest in mysticism to William Blake's poems, and he later studied Eastern religions' mantras quite seriously. Read the transcript of the 1980 lecture he gave here, and I don't think you'll conclude that Ginsberg was either ignorant of or dismissive of poetic formal traditions, although he admits to have not known Greek metrical principles at the time he wrote "Howl."

Plath had studied with Robert Lowell, who wrote both formal and free verse and must surely have provided her a firm grounding in both. Yes, she chose to do her own thing, for good or ill depending on one's opinion, but she didn't do that from ignorance of what the formal rules were.

[Hilary Biehl]

Sylvia Plath was steeped in tradition. If you read her earlier poetry - for instance, the poems in her book The Colossus - you will find a great deal of formalism. In her later poems she did move away from strict forms, but she didn't forget the technical skills she knew, and there is plenty of rhyme (full and slant), assonance, alliteration etc as well as rhythmic awareness in the later poems.

As far as schools, I don't really think about poetry that way. I look at individual poets. Whether they belonged to or could be considered to belong to a particular movement (eg. the Imagists, the Acmeists) can be of historical and critical interest, but I don't know how helpful it is in the writing of poetry.

[Glenn Wright]

I should have been more careful not to imply that Pound, Ginsberg, and Plath lacked a knowledge of tradition. I meant to offer them as examples of poets who, in my own estimation, occasionally sacrifice sublimity for novelty, resulting in their omission from my list of favorite poets. I do, however, like individual poems by all three. Other readers will, of course, have different takes on poets they like or are less fond of. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Glenn

[Shaun J. Russell]

I mostly agree with Hilary in that I rarely think of poetry in terms of "schools," other than when I'm teaching a poetry course...in which case it's often useful to delineate. That being said, there's something special to me about the Harlem Renaissance. What I especially love (beyond the free expression of a marginalized group) is that members of the Harlem Renaissance were stylistically all over the map. You had the high formalism of Claude McKay rubbing elbows with the (mostly) free verse of Langston Hughes...but they were undeniably unified.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by Hilary Biehl

As far as schools, I don't really think about poetry that way. I look at individual poets. Whether they belonged to or could be considered to belong to a particular movement (eg. the Imagists, the Acmeists) can be of historical and critical interest, but I don't know how helpful it is in the writing of poetry.

I'm the same way. When I started out I was actually quite uninformed about the history of poetry, famous poets, and different styles.

It was only when my writing started to lean toward certain trends that I realized my preferences had, as Julie put it, affinity to styles that had come before me. But I still don't see my writing as falling into any tidy boxes, it's more an amalgamation of different approaches and poets I've read, and my own voice.

That being said, these days I am interested in what's been done, what views about writing are out there. So I can look for insight at a higher level than that found directly in the words. That's the reason I started this topic.

[Nick McRae]

For inquiring minds here's a comprehensive list of poetic schools I just came across:

List of Poetry Groups and Movements

[Hilary Biehl]

Not uninformed, I just don't find it all that helpful. To use Plath again, if you are reading her work - not teaching it or writing an essay, just reading her - is it really helpful to think of her as a "confessional" poet? I would argue that it isn't. While it's probably good to know that she is widely identified as such (and I'm not sure how one could not know it), and that there was a connection between her and Lowell, an attachment to the idea of her as confessional might actually interfere with one's ability to read the poems as they are.

Blake is generally considered a Romantic poet, but is that helpful in reading and understanding Blake outside of the classroom?

etc.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Is it helpful?
Well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
Getting a grasp of historical cultural trends can be fascinating.
But that is, of course, no substitute for a one-to-one encounter with an individual poet.

Nemo