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Classic Vs. Modern Poetry (Part Two)

© Audrey McCrone

In modern poetry, we see more liberal topics discussed openly. Religion gets de-emphasized, as “god” isn’t always capitalized anymore. Imagery becomes open to emotional interpretation in Modern poetry, while sexuality is candidly addressed as well. Poets begin to separate concepts that were collectively addressed before, such as love becoming a separate concept from sex, just as “Body” and “Soul” become a sense of physical and spiritual health, separate theories for Walt Whitman. I also tend to believe we, as humans, have a spiritual and emotional self, working in conjunction with our physicalities.

Formal poetry, or classic form, relies heavily on end rhyme, which can be enjoyable if not feeling forced and using exacting language and rhythm. Basic poetic techniques, such as the metaphor and simile can be attributed to the world's earliest known poets (the Greeks). In Victorian Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson wrote an objective correlative called “Hope is the thing with feathers” which attests that hope is what keeps us going, and seems to be sweetest in times of tumult, motioning us through conflict or repression. None of Dickinson's poems have titles, and are referred to by first lines instead. The bird she describes becomes the symbolic embodiment of the base concept that maintains motivation within us. Hope gives, but doesn’t take:

Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

In free verse, rhyme is less obvious, falling between lines as to follow formal technique without restriction. Likewise, language is more expansive in modern poetry, as opposed to the concise nature of classic poetry. A prime example of these ideas are apparent in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, both of which utilize effective imagery, while displaying what a chauvinist Eliot was, as was common thinking in his time. All poets speak something of the societies around them, sometimes politically.

Women’s role in classic poetry is scarce, at best. Women seemed to have an amazing domestic lack of voice or conviction. One notes the male version of female beauty: Helen (the proverbial “face that could launch a thousand ships,” a subject of Edgar Allen Poe). Women were objectified, even by women (while Dickinson describes them as “soft cherubic faces,” but also superficial gossips incapable of higher thought. Writers of classic poetry rejected a feminine place among the great minds of literature, which was stigmatically perpetuated for centuries, in a male-dominated society.

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