In my opinion, it started to go this way right around post-structuralism, the Death of the Author and the belief that verse, meter and rhythm were unnecessary oppressive obstacles. Ideas that started to solidify roughly more than half a century ago.
But always look for the gaps, because that's where some fun opportunities to play reside. And rhyme and meter constitute a massive gap in today's story of poetry. Clarke told us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but the same is true of form in a world in which it is no longer practiced or understood.
The status of poetry, and the intertwined notions of amateur, serious, public, personal/private, and emotion at work here, are fascinating. Perhaps because I'm a professor, but the idea of "serious" poetry, to be read (or, more likely, that we feel we should have read, and understood better, but life is busy) comes quite naturally. And the serious, more formal, poetry before modernism is a far country, but one that we know we should respect. But the idea of amateur poetry, in the sense that Austen is using it, is really odd . . . though we do it sometimes for children, which perhaps gives us license? And weirdly, I've written quite a lot of amateur poetry. But I was trying to be serious! Anyway, fascinating. Thank you.
In my experience, the example of free verse and modernist fragmentation made traditional meter and rhyme seem uncool. Clarity seemed uncool. In high school, I would have scoffed at the idea that I had fallen prey to fashion, but that's what happened. I tried to unlearn my natural ability to compose reasonably competent blank verse. In France, the Oulipo writers adopted all kinds of arbitrary devices to break the Alexandrine "tyranny."
In my schooling, meter and rhyme weren't effectively taught, so students didn't learn them, and when they became teachers and parents they couldn't teach them. In my very brief experience of teaching creative writing to university students, I discovered that they did not hear the meter. When they read aloud, metrical poems and free verse poems were indistinguishable. When their reading did fall into a meter, they couldn't hear it. Teaching required more than providing metrical templates; it required training the students' ears. I don't think I accomplished much in my one semester of trying.
The necessary backdrop is that readers thought that modernist poems were sneering at them, through obscurity and irony; they returned the compliment and gradually quit reading pretty much any poetry. My father (1926 - 1977) had a bit of night business school, but no other secondary education. He voluntarily read Kipling, Robert Service, Byron, Shelley, and many others. I can tell from his underlining and marginal ticks that he read most of a 600 page anthology of poetry. It was published in 1938 and included many newspaper poems. So far as I know, none of my siblings, including the avid readers, read poetry (except mine, sometimes).
I thought it was an issue of form at first, but then I realised that it is not just formal occasional verse that they are not writing (granted good occasional free verse is even harder to write). I do agree about clarity being uncool having something to do with it.
If amateurs familiar with traditional verse write a poem in couplets, or blank verse, or ballad stanzas, when they finish they know they've written a poem--maybe not a good one, but a poem that others will recognize as such. When amateurs write free verse, how do they know that what they're writing is a poem or something that others will recognize as a poem?
In my brief period as a private English tutor for 16 year olds and older, who were being educated in state schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I considered the level of literacy was lower than when I was at school in the 1950s and 60s. I am referring to prose exercises. Understanding of poetry, rhyme, metre, blank verse etc was non-existent. I speculate that those students were rarely if ever exposed to poetry in school so it was like a foreign language to them.
I presume (I have never deliberately written free verse, because I do not have sufficient command of poetic form to do it well) either they rhyme occasionally, or have some sort of conception of line/sentence length.
While browsing through a trove of old family documents I came across several newspapers from the late 19th c, kept for relevant stories. Mostly they were from the local paper of a small southern town. They included a number of short poems contributed by readers, placed here and there like advertisements or cartoons. The poems were surprisingly well-crafted, in both form and content, much better than I would expect from today's "educated" adults.
The tradition of occasional poetry is still encountered, here and there; I've been to one wedding where a relative of the bride read verses she had composed for the occasion, and my wife was given a similar poem at her bridal shower. But there is certainly not an expectation that the average adult should be able to write such poems. To build on Fr Robert Krishna's surmise, emotion is regarded as a highly individual thing; it is seen as not something to be experienced communally. "We're all at the same wedding so we're all going to have the same feelings" is an idea which simply isn't found in modern life.
I've written and performed two occasional poems--one for a wedding. I didn't want to write this poem, but at the time I felt I was not a in position to refuse. I'd have more backbone now. The other poem was at the dedication of a bridge named for my grandfather, a deputy sheriff killed in 1938. This time I was glad to add my bit to the brief, informal ceremony, and the results were not unsatisfactory. I was able to pay tribute to the lovely countryside and people and deal reasonably well with the ambiguous circumstances of my grandfather's death.
It has been abandoned to the extent that poetry has come to be seen above all as an expression of emotion. People do make up little rhymes, or rap songs that they fit to an extant tune, but they would be embarrassed to share it with someone they are not close to. Someone once said to me that he couldn't understand why people would publish poetry and invite everyone into their emotional lives. This person definitely could write poetry, but will not do so, to the extent that he sees it as nothing more than inviting people to peer into his inner life.
In my opinion, it started to go this way right around post-structuralism, the Death of the Author and the belief that verse, meter and rhythm were unnecessary oppressive obstacles. Ideas that started to solidify roughly more than half a century ago.
But always look for the gaps, because that's where some fun opportunities to play reside. And rhyme and meter constitute a massive gap in today's story of poetry. Clarke told us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but the same is true of form in a world in which it is no longer practiced or understood.
The status of poetry, and the intertwined notions of amateur, serious, public, personal/private, and emotion at work here, are fascinating. Perhaps because I'm a professor, but the idea of "serious" poetry, to be read (or, more likely, that we feel we should have read, and understood better, but life is busy) comes quite naturally. And the serious, more formal, poetry before modernism is a far country, but one that we know we should respect. But the idea of amateur poetry, in the sense that Austen is using it, is really odd . . . though we do it sometimes for children, which perhaps gives us license? And weirdly, I've written quite a lot of amateur poetry. But I was trying to be serious! Anyway, fascinating. Thank you.
In my experience, the example of free verse and modernist fragmentation made traditional meter and rhyme seem uncool. Clarity seemed uncool. In high school, I would have scoffed at the idea that I had fallen prey to fashion, but that's what happened. I tried to unlearn my natural ability to compose reasonably competent blank verse. In France, the Oulipo writers adopted all kinds of arbitrary devices to break the Alexandrine "tyranny."
In my schooling, meter and rhyme weren't effectively taught, so students didn't learn them, and when they became teachers and parents they couldn't teach them. In my very brief experience of teaching creative writing to university students, I discovered that they did not hear the meter. When they read aloud, metrical poems and free verse poems were indistinguishable. When their reading did fall into a meter, they couldn't hear it. Teaching required more than providing metrical templates; it required training the students' ears. I don't think I accomplished much in my one semester of trying.
The necessary backdrop is that readers thought that modernist poems were sneering at them, through obscurity and irony; they returned the compliment and gradually quit reading pretty much any poetry. My father (1926 - 1977) had a bit of night business school, but no other secondary education. He voluntarily read Kipling, Robert Service, Byron, Shelley, and many others. I can tell from his underlining and marginal ticks that he read most of a 600 page anthology of poetry. It was published in 1938 and included many newspaper poems. So far as I know, none of my siblings, including the avid readers, read poetry (except mine, sometimes).
I thought it was an issue of form at first, but then I realised that it is not just formal occasional verse that they are not writing (granted good occasional free verse is even harder to write). I do agree about clarity being uncool having something to do with it.
If amateurs familiar with traditional verse write a poem in couplets, or blank verse, or ballad stanzas, when they finish they know they've written a poem--maybe not a good one, but a poem that others will recognize as such. When amateurs write free verse, how do they know that what they're writing is a poem or something that others will recognize as a poem?
In my brief period as a private English tutor for 16 year olds and older, who were being educated in state schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I considered the level of literacy was lower than when I was at school in the 1950s and 60s. I am referring to prose exercises. Understanding of poetry, rhyme, metre, blank verse etc was non-existent. I speculate that those students were rarely if ever exposed to poetry in school so it was like a foreign language to them.
And we live in an age of screens, not books.
I presume (I have never deliberately written free verse, because I do not have sufficient command of poetic form to do it well) either they rhyme occasionally, or have some sort of conception of line/sentence length.
While browsing through a trove of old family documents I came across several newspapers from the late 19th c, kept for relevant stories. Mostly they were from the local paper of a small southern town. They included a number of short poems contributed by readers, placed here and there like advertisements or cartoons. The poems were surprisingly well-crafted, in both form and content, much better than I would expect from today's "educated" adults.
The tradition of occasional poetry is still encountered, here and there; I've been to one wedding where a relative of the bride read verses she had composed for the occasion, and my wife was given a similar poem at her bridal shower. But there is certainly not an expectation that the average adult should be able to write such poems. To build on Fr Robert Krishna's surmise, emotion is regarded as a highly individual thing; it is seen as not something to be experienced communally. "We're all at the same wedding so we're all going to have the same feelings" is an idea which simply isn't found in modern life.
I've written and performed two occasional poems--one for a wedding. I didn't want to write this poem, but at the time I felt I was not a in position to refuse. I'd have more backbone now. The other poem was at the dedication of a bridge named for my grandfather, a deputy sheriff killed in 1938. This time I was glad to add my bit to the brief, informal ceremony, and the results were not unsatisfactory. I was able to pay tribute to the lovely countryside and people and deal reasonably well with the ambiguous circumstances of my grandfather's death.
It has been abandoned to the extent that poetry has come to be seen above all as an expression of emotion. People do make up little rhymes, or rap songs that they fit to an extant tune, but they would be embarrassed to share it with someone they are not close to. Someone once said to me that he couldn't understand why people would publish poetry and invite everyone into their emotional lives. This person definitely could write poetry, but will not do so, to the extent that he sees it as nothing more than inviting people to peer into his inner life.
Well, there's a vast amount of culture gone wrong in that conception of poetry.
I agree, but it is not uncommon, even amongst the intelligent (as the person who said this to me certainly is).