The New Poetry

 I was reading today John Wain's intoduction to the Oxford Dictionary of Great English Poetry and something he concluded with strucj a real and refreshing cord with me:-"The last forty years has seen the growth of a kind of processed, mass-market 'modern' poetry, very much the same in every country, easy enough to translate, to handle, to package, to ship across frontiers. This poetry is always in free verse, usually no more than a matter of witing it as prose and printing it to look like verse; it departs entirely from the tradtition and the forms that grew up naturally in that particular culture. The individual poems are like flowers that are cut and put in a vase of water; they have no roots and no soil clinging to them."

And as Auden puts it "Poetry is like a valley cheese; local but prized elsewhere"

This pushed me to write the following as a protest poem (of a sorts)

To 'The New Poetry'
All form and rules are
laughed upon
and rhyming rhymes
are damned as one

the way of poets
now betrayed
embrace The New
free verse parade

when rhyme and metre
fade away
no longer needed
in this day

then we have lost
something so deep
Hot poets strut
and cold ones weep

As heritage and time
dear bought
are fast replaced
by shallow thought