[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

That's a fundamental disagreement I have. It's difficult for me to take modern poetry seriously on account of how it sounds. Modern English is, in my view, anathema to poetry. It just doesn't work well for the medium. It comes off as vulgar, coarse, and a confused heap of syllables that have as much structure to them as a pile of gravel.

N., like Mark, I'm curious to hear where your chronological cutoff is for Modern English usage in formal poetry. By and large, do you find Robert Frost's work to be vulgar, coarse, and unstructured? W. H. Auden's?* Philip Larkin's? Richard Wilbur's? Les Murray's? A.E. Stallings's? Would you say that their use of contemporary English in formal poetry "just doesn't work well for the medium"? Because most other readers find their work masterful.

I suspect that what you really mean is that when you try to write poetry in Modern English yourself, you find it frustratingly hard. But, well, writing good poetry of any sort is frustratingly hard. Welcome to the club.

Giving yourself permission to invert normal sentence structure, with the excuse that it's intended to evoke another era, is one way to try to make it easier. But cheats like pretending to be someone who talks funny to modern ears are not going to save a poem that doesn't have something interesting to say, or interesting ways to say it. (I did think that your weaponry imagery was interesting, and I enjoyed a lot of your alliteration; but these things, although skillful, were not enough to make this topic new for me.)

You have a perfect right to flatly reject the modern English idiom in which most of us are writing at Eratosphere, if that's not your style. But if so, you probably won't receive writing advice here that is useful for the effects you want to achieve.

You will undoubtedly receive criticism more in harmony with your own ars poetica in an online poetry community like the Society for Classical Poets, where the regulars never met an inversion or elision they didn't like.

(Caveat: they also tend to be inordinately fond of poems redolent of certain political and societal views, which may or may not align with your own. And they also never tire of posting poems in which the authors congratulate themselves for being so gosh darn brave and clever and countercultural as to write in rhyme and meter rather than in free verse, which they condemn as the worst thing to ever happen to Western Civilization. I haven't taken a peek over there in a while...yep, they have lots of recent examples of all of the above.)


* Okay, yeah, there was that one incredibly profane blowjob poem of Auden's, but that was intended as an inside joke to be shared among friends, not for publication.