You are quite right that a lot of older poetry in strict forms is either not very good (form exists to achieve an effect, and is not an end in itself, which can be forgotten) and one should also remember that the things that mattered when it was written can be either misunderstood by, irrelevant to, or even anathema to the mind of the modern reader. So there is no guarantee of quality in what is ancient.
My point is mainly that I know of no way of defining poetry that means anything that can include the kinds of things that are being written today; and because of that lack of definition, it is also very hard to find objective ways of saying whether it has been written well or badly. From that it follows that mostly it will be written badly, because if no one can say if it has been written well for hard and fast reasons, that condition will include the author; and if the author cannot tell quality, they cannot improve what they have written.
So let the stuff that is today being touted as 'poetry' be called something else, and appreciated for its own merits in its own way, but whatever its merits are and are not, they are not the merits of poetry, and calling the two the same obscures reason and progress, rather than achieving anything. I also write prose, and I call it prose. I try to write it well. Doing so is an entirely different discipline to (rhythmical) poetry, and very much harder to define. As a result, I end up unsure myself whether I have done it well or badly, whereas with rhythmical poetry I can be sure of the merits and failings of whatever I have done.
Above all, line breaks do no turn prose into poetry, and to suppose that they do so is infantile. One could take a Shakespeare play and write it out without the line breaks and it would remain iambic. The purpose of the line breaks is to reflect rhythm; with them the underlying and deliberate intent to write in iambic pentameters becomes more apparent; the line breaks better reveal what is already inherent in what is there; they serve a purpose. In most modern poetry, line breaks appear to me to be there for no other reason than to allow the writer to claim that they are writing poetry when they are actually writing prose; take them away, and where would the reader put them to restore the original? No one would agree. Take them out of Shakespeare, and anyone with the least understanding of rhythm could put them back again correctly.
Absolutely no one has ever given me a contrary line of reasoning that begins to address this. By all means do ---
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Date: 2009-05-26 09:20 am (UTC)My point is mainly that I know of no way of defining poetry that means anything that can include the kinds of things that are being written today; and because of that lack of definition, it is also very hard to find objective ways of saying whether it has been written well or badly. From that it follows that mostly it will be written badly, because if no one can say if it has been written well for hard and fast reasons, that condition will include the author; and if the author cannot tell quality, they cannot improve what they have written.
So let the stuff that is today being touted as 'poetry' be called something else, and appreciated for its own merits in its own way, but whatever its merits are and are not, they are not the merits of poetry, and calling the two the same obscures reason and progress, rather than achieving anything. I also write prose, and I call it prose. I try to write it well. Doing so is an entirely different discipline to (rhythmical) poetry, and very much harder to define. As a result, I end up unsure myself whether I have done it well or badly, whereas with rhythmical poetry I can be sure of the merits and failings of whatever I have done.
Above all, line breaks do no turn prose into poetry, and to suppose that they do so is infantile. One could take a Shakespeare play and write it out without the line breaks and it would remain iambic. The purpose of the line breaks is to reflect rhythm; with them the underlying and deliberate intent to write in iambic pentameters becomes more apparent; the line breaks better reveal what is already inherent in what is there; they serve a purpose. In most modern poetry, line breaks appear to me to be there for no other reason than to allow the writer to claim that they are writing poetry when they are actually writing prose; take them away, and where would the reader put them to restore the original? No one would agree. Take them out of Shakespeare, and anyone with the least understanding of rhythm could put them back again correctly.
Absolutely no one has ever given me a contrary line of reasoning that begins to address this. By all means do ---