Blank+Verse

Blank verse has become a rarity in today's world of poetry. When I read the Contemporary Context, it made it seem like we have become too lazy for blank verse, too lazy for long lines in iambic pentameter. "Our present-day preference for directness means fewer adjectives or adverbs, fewer subordinate or qualifying clauses (except in academic writing) that might lengthen the sentence" (104). We want our poetry quick and easy. Modern poets seem to reject long lines and complex sentence structure. "Our mistrust of verbal play has made it hard for us to accept sentences that extend beyond a three or four stress line" (104). Has our impatience caused poetry to take a turn for the worse? I guess it is natural for the common forms of poetry to shift over time. Yet in our poetry book, we don't study many modern poems. In one hundred years, will today's short, arguably "lazy" poems be studied like the ones of Shakespeare and Milton? I wonder if poetry will ever be as popular as it once was. 1205203236

KGa, you pose a lot of questions in this post but I agree with some of your conclusions. For one, I think that we have become lazy and are leaning towards shorter poetry. Think about the "Easter Wings" poem. Myself included, it has been my favorite heroic couplet so far, and I think that its length has something to do with it. Another example is the poem in a pervious section (I can't think of the form) that was called "We Real Cool." It was extremely short, and yet I think it was one of my favorite poems. Are we lazy? I don't think so. I think that the shortened poem is just an adaption to the times. Again myself included, I believe everyone is much busier than they were 100 years ago. We can communicate across the nation in a second and even across the globe in a matter of seconds. Many people live their lives on overdrive. In some sort of confusing path, I think that this has led to much more shortened poetry to be written now, and thus moving away from blank verse. 1205203717

I also think that the tendency of modern poetry to be shorter is just part of the changing times. We no longer need poems to tell stories and such, so the longer forms are no longer necessary. I wonder how popular poetry really was considering the times when much of the poetry was written before literacy was common. I'm just trying to imagine how people would have enjoyed poetry. I keep coming up with a picture of poets in bars instead of hiring a band to play. (I'm not sure that's how it really was though!) We don't have a need for poetry to entertain us like that anymore--there is pleny of technology out there that keeps us more than occupied. Our times have developed into fast-paced always rushing, always being productive. The poetry has evolved with the times to be similar. We want direct and to the point. Waste no time. Not neccessarily bad, not neccessarily good. I think it's just the natural way poetry develops. 1205213371

When KGa asked if poetry would ever be as popular as it used to be, it reminded me of our last essay. The author pointed out that poetry was never popular--if people prefer to watch TV today, then in the old days, those people were illiterate and working on the farm. Poetry has never been a pop culture phenomenon. However, I think that we HAVE been studying some modern poems in our poetry book. If you notice, the book usually starts out with old poems and move to the most modern ones at the end. Since we are not familiar with many modern poets, these don't jump out as modern poetry to us, but may not seem any more relevant because it is still poetry, dealing with complex and unusual ideas. As far as laziness, I think that we have become more picky. I don't want to waste my time reading long, dull, drawn out sentences, so I have learned to recognize how an "interesting" sentence looks on the page. Perhaps this judgement is limiting our options, but I think it helps us to recognize poems that interest us. 1205240647

Poems have gotten shorter because our society has placed more emphasis on the quickest, fastest way something can get done. It’s all about efficiency in our day and age. Just think how much of our technology is an quicker, more efficient improvement on an already existing computer, cell phone, internet connection, etc. When society places more value on the quick and efficient, poetry reflects that. Thus, poems become shorter, more efficient and lack the modifiers and lengthy sentences that poets used to use. I don’t think that modern poetry has gotten lazy. If anything it might have gotten even harder because the poet in many circumstances is trying to connect with a broader range of an audience that has had many more experiences than those of 100 years ago. And to top it all of, the poet has to be more efficient with the words he or she uses than ever before. While it is easy to see shorter and less complex as lazy, it many ways one could argue that modern poetry has become harder to do than ever. 1205257762

I think that poems have grown shorter over the years because society promotes a movement towards modernity. It isn't so much that our society places emphasis on speed, and it does, but rather poets want to move into a territory of art that has not yet been explored. Blank verse has been around for hundreds of years and used in almost every format possible. Poets don't want to be compared to previous poets. Instead they try to create new forms and sounds of poetry that can be unique to them. Although we are only exposed to modern poems at the end of each section of our book, I think the reason for this is most modern poems have not withstood the test of time. There are some poems today that may seem worthy of praise and intellectual contemplation, but will anyone care fifty years from now. Also, the word "modern poetry" usually refers to poetry from the early twentieth century, if I'm not mistaking. Isn't poetry from the current day known as contemporary? Is there a difference? If there is a difference, has poetry been moving towards the types of poems we see today from the beginning of the twentieth century? 1205260205

If we were to really think about it, I'm sure that some of the first poems we ever heard were no more than 4-10 lines long. From the traditional pieces that have become almost a part of our culture, for instance, "roses are red, violets are blue..." to much longer works that are rarely presented to society. I think that the shorter, simpler, and more concise the poem, the easier it is to remember. How long would it take someone to memorize a portion of Pope's essay compared to a nursery rhyme? I don't think that the shorter poem is the more modern poem because so many people write in traditional forms. I think that there is a difference between modern and contemporary poetry, to answer your question KSm. When I think of contemporary, I think the content of the poem that would change with the times as any other feature might. Modern seems to be directed more towards the style of the poem, such as the length, stature, rhyme scheme, etc. Any thoughts?1205278963

I personally don't really see the difference in modern and contemporary. To me, modern and contemporary poetry are the same thing. I think that the structures of poems from the present and poems from hundreds of years ago are pretty much the same. Poets may change them around a little to fit their specific poem but I think that overall the form has stayed the same for the most part. The only major difference that I think has changed is the language, obviously, we aren't living in the 1800s anymore. Whether it's a poem written in Britain one hundred years ago or a poem written by someone in the U.S. ten years ago, we still have to search for its meaning and analyze it. I don't think there are that many differences between poems written long ago and poems written today. 1205287679

adi, I laughed when you mentioned hiring someone to read a poem in a bar instead of a band. But then I realized... that does happen! Not at bars, but at coffee shops. Yes, TV portrays it as a bunch of "strange" people getting together in a coffee shop snapping their fingers, but I believe that poetry is performed in coffee shops. Peotry is a great form of entertainment nowadays. We are used to poetry though songs, but we have to realize that those words are poetic too. We listen to poetry not just because it has a great rhyme, because of the message and meaning behind the words. It seems that today poetry is a little bit "out there." That is only my opinion though. But we have to realize that back then, society must have thought that those poets' ideas were "out there" too. lsi made the comment that we have become too picky, and i agree. We read all of this classic poetry and we have been told that this is great poetry. But when we see something different, something modern, we don't think that it is "right." 1205290521

I think that ever since we were young we were told this is what a poem looks like, it has to look like this, sound like this, and rhyme like this or it isn't a poem. At first I was sort of bored with the blank verse, but now I am starting to appreciate the effort that the poets put into creating their poems. I think that poetry is a big cup of gray; there aren't really lines that define it. We have become too picky with our entertainment because of television, computers, and videogames. Thus, I do not really think our generation is able to immediately understand and comprehend these poems. As teenagers were are too impatient to ponder the meaning of poem, we want to get it right aways. Thus, this is great poetry and it is "right" as szd states. 1205366143

Sorry, when was poetry ever popular? Seriously? I don't think it's ever been 'really popular', the closest thing being the stories that raconteurs and troubadours used to tell. It's always been a tighter knit group of people. Can you think of a peasant picking up and reading poetry? What about a foot soldier, or renaissance merchant? Banker? Explorer? Imperial politician? It's always been just a few poetry-aficionado men that've been into poetry, so I think you're falling back into the 'the past was better' type of thought. And I don't think that it's necessarily our laziness, but just the style of the time, when every thing's more fast-paced to match our fast-paced lives. Maybe people are thinking blank verse is too modern, much how many people nowadays are getting sick of modern art with black dots on white canvases, or else solid red canvases? It's the turning style, cuz after all, some of the poetry that's coming out now is more difficult to read than blank verse. 1205448741

Well poetry may not have been popular, but it was more than likely read more often in the Shakespeare's or Milton's time. We have to realize that the times have changed vastly. Our lives now are running at a faster pace due to so many reasons. One of them includes technology. We live in a world where everything is exact and to the point. We always want an answer and most people don't enjoy dilly dallying. We want results and we want them quickly. Life seems to be revolved around that notion. Poetry could be possibly affected by this as well. KGa mentioned how poetry is losing its long detailed sentences. I feel that this has a lot to do with the world we live in. Authors are influenced by what goes on around them and a fast pace and to the point world is one of those things. But I do feel that the poems from today will be studied how we study Shakespeare's poems today. The world will keep evolving and along with the world everything else will change including poetry. The poetry of today will be different from the poetry of the future. In the future, people can look back and see how poetry was written today and more than likely study it intensely.1205457470

well, i dont really know if it is so much that we are lazy, but maybe we have just become a society that is less interested in deciphering meaning and more interesting in just getting to the point. I am not saying that it is a good thing, it just is, at least in a larger portion than before. It is sad kind of because the works of Shakespeare and Milton of beautiful and there is something to be said for beautiful blank verse. It takes skill and precision while using language and words. It is pretty amazing. I am excited what the next generation will be like. We have gone from shakespeare to short and sweet. What's next? 1205461466