Why, you ask, would I be uninterested in 'modern' poetry?
Good question.
I suppose the initial reason is that I hold poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley in reverent esteem. From the time I entered grade school until the day I graduated from the eighth grade I memorized and recited a poem each Friday as part of my English Language class. Each student in our little one-roomed country school did the same. Because of that requirement, I became familiar with everything from doggerel verse:
(There was a lady
Loved a swine.
"Pig-hog,
Wilt thou be mine?"
Can't remember the stanzas that followed but the mental image of a woman declaring undying amour to a snorting swine tickled my fancy then and has ever since.)
to the rhythmic refrains of Edgar Allen Poe:
(Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.)
to the immortal poetry of Longfellow:
( By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. )
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. )
and the beautiful imagery of Robert W. Service:
(There are strange things done in the midnight sun
SHOULD I TRY MY HAND?
Should I, a fledgling poet, try my hand
at writing sonnets, odes or villanelles —
word pictures left like wayward waves on sand
to tease and tantalize cerebral cells?
Perhaps a terza rima or a glose
would be a better style for my rhyme.
I start out well - but am not even close
To making my feet fit required time.
My fellow poets say I should not use
such archaic words—or phrases trite and true.
They seem to think free verse the only muse
and favor rambling form to clerihew.
I try them all but don’t know which is worse.
Perhaps I’d better stick to doggerel verse.