Here We Stand

An introduction to a new publication about poetry, ancient and modern

Poets Ancient and Modern (generated by imagine.art)

In 1861, a man named Henry Williams Baker (1821–1877) organized a collection of hymns for use in the Church of England. Appearing in the great era of formalizing religious music, the book was a late fruit of both the Protestantizing of Methodism (which gave English believers a new sense of hymn composition) and the Catholicizing of the Oxford Movement (which gave Anglicanism a reawakened awareness of the old Latin hymns). Connecting the two, Baker and his advisors chose for their new hymnal the title Hymns Ancient and Modern.

The neatness of that title inspired “Poems Ancient and Modern,” the title of our new Substack publication on poetry. And something more, as well, for we live in a strange era of poetry. Here in 2024, our literary moment is dominated by a kind of presentism, with the past largely locked away, forgotten and obscure. The tradition of English-language poetry — an enormous deposit of art — seems too easily dismissed th…