In Defense of Traditional Poetry

   We live in the age of free verse “poetry”,

poetry without rhythm or rhyme. Free verse

is the only poetry that is given awards to, or

recognized these days. Most modern poets

write it, and off the top of my head I cannot

name a single Canadian, American, or

English poet creating traditional rhyming

poetry. The only published poets I have ever

encountered in real life wrote free verse.

Back when I was in English class in high

school and poetry class in CEGEP (a couple

of years tacked on to high school in a

college in Quebec), the anthologies I had

to study presented traditional rhyming

poetry as the past and free verse as the

future. It was usually described as new,

fresh, inventive, ground-breaking, etc.,

but it has been around now for around a

hundred years, and surely these super-

latives cannot still apply to an art-form

that we have been acquainted with our

whole lives, that is taught in school, and

whose most famous and respected practi-

tioners are now all long dead and gone?

Free verse was originally the plaything

of a small group of bohemians around the

start of the 20th century. The sort of bo-

hemians that longed for the freedom to be

more hedonistic and saw themselves as

enemies of Christianity and Western

civilization. Their art was basically a

finger to the Western tradition. As luck

would have it, European civilization

received a crippling blow to its confi-

dence with the slaughter of World War I.

Suddenly, the attitudes and nihilistic

experiments of free verse poets and

modern artists, whose creations were

often nothing more than jokes and insults,

gained respectability and intellectual

credibility, and were feted and funded by

an increasing powerful moneyed elite that

was different from the traditional nobility,

in that despised the common man even

more than the old elite. This elite believed

they owed no allegiance to any nation or

religion, and were eager to sweep away

Christian Europe in favour of godless

global government. The horrors of World

War II delivered an even greater wound to

European culture and its self-image, and

free verse and modern art became

institutionalized thereafter as the dominant

art forms of the materialistic and post-

Christian world we live in.

 This degradation of art and poetry was,

and is, celebrated and accepted as "self-

expression” and “freedom”, but now that

the dust has settled, rather than something

liberating, free verse can be seen to fit

perfectly into a plan for a society of in-

creased control, surveillance, and censor-

ship because it is the form of poetry that

communicates nothing meaningful and

concrete to the reader. Its typical

vacuousness and inarticulateness is an

advantageous feature in a time of mass

communication, in that it requires no need

of monitoring and censoring. As people

of the 21th century, we have been taught

and become accustomed to deceiving

ourselves that we find pleasure and

enlightenment in nonsense and artlessness,

the way people in the fairy tale admired

the Emperor’s new clothes. Such induced

madness and lack of critical thinking works

to the benefit of governments and big

businesses that may want to later on

convince us that a war or some loss of

freedom we suffer is good for us.

      True poetry and art is about communi-

cation, reaching out to other people and

showing that you have feelings and dreams

in common with them. Rhyming traditional

verse was always a far more democratic,

popular, and censor-free form of poetry, in

that you did not even need to read and

write to create it (as for example: Duncan

Ban MacIntryre / Donnchadh Bàn Mac

an t-Saoir could not read a word of his

poetry). The common people used to have

great pride in their national poets and

could recite their poems by heart.

Memorization was aided by standards and

conventions in rhythm and rhyme. These

conventions provided a reliable framework

in which to place your art, and by using

them you were not at all restricted, but col-

laborating with a tradition; rather than

selfishly indulging in a project of unap-

pealing self-expression which has no need

for skill or hard work. Technically, the

purpose of rhyme is to tell a listener where

a line in a poem ends, and the rhythm lets

you know where to expect a rhyme.

Rhythm and rhyme working together can

make the most mudane observations sound

magical and profound, the words fitting

together so pleasantly and perfectly. When

Johnny Cochran argued “If it don’t fit, you

must acquit!” he was invoking this kind of

magic: that what he was arguing was right

because it sounded so right. Due to free

verse being a medium that mainly exists

on paper, and it is only by seeing it on

paper that one can understand that it is

not prose, it only came into dominance

in an era of mass publishing and allowed

publishers to determine who was and

was not a poet rather than the public.

Before the internet, if you self-published,

it was seen as an act of vanity, and presses

that catered to poets and writers that did

not measure up to the prejudices of the

big publishers were called “vanity

presses”. Even excellent poets like A.E.

Housman had to pay to have their work

printed. Traditional verse did not have to

be outlawed, it just did not have to be

published.

      The promotion of free verse also

seems to be part of a broader campaign

of instilling in people the dangerous

idea of that elitism and rule by experts

is the correct way. The inaccessibility of

free verse suggests that art is not for the

masses but for connoisseurs, and

majority will just have to put up with

unpleasantness or be condemned as

bores. Without comprehensible

poetry, people have no other way of un-

derstanding the world except through the

official pronouncements of the government,

or through the propaganda dished out by

the mass media and the entertainment

industry. All this is to the benefit of

those who like things the way they are,

that is: the people that wish to profit

from us, rule us, and experiment on us. I

cannot recall any modern free verse poets

or poems ever being condemned by the

government or press during my lifetime;

they are seen as no threat by the powers

that be. I can see a future where artless

free verse will be churned out by civil-

servants aided by AI, and celebrated.

Rather than a natural progression in the

art of poetry, free verse is a negation of

tradition.

I am sure that I could find many

people that would agree with everything

I have written so far (excluding those

whose profession depends on promoting

free verse, or those who consider them-

selves free verse poets). Where most

people would probably part ways with me

would be in regard to my contention that

that poetry should be sung and not read,

but it is vital to poetry’s rebirth that this

idea must be reconsidered. As a result of

the long reign of free verse poetry, the view

that poetry should sound exactly like prose

has become entrenched. This belief is so

strong that whenever people encounter

traditional poetry, they thoughtlessly read

it aloud instead of even singing it. The pre-

judice against the singing of poetry is truly

amazing. As a Gael, I am aware that in the

Gaelic tradition there was no difference

between poem and song. That such a tra-

dition surely once existed in England, when

poetry was transmitted orally is beyond

question to me, yet I clearly remember a

hippie high-school teacher I had praising a

poem specifically because it sounded like

conventional speech. The fact that

Shakespeare is often hailed as the greatest

English poet seems to have to do with the

fact that the bulk of his work is unrhyming

iambic pentameter which is usually delivered

as a dramatic-reading style rather than as

poetry. Why is it so important that poetry

should sound like prose? The Aeneid begins

with the line: “Of arms and the man I sing!”

not “Of arms and the man I talk!” English

speakers have forgotten their singing heri-

tage and have developed a philosophy to

explain away their lost tradition, in the

same way that the Victorians developed

a false admiration of Greek sculpture for

its whiteness, when in fact it was all once

gaudily painted. I will record some videos

for Youtube in which I will try to “sing”

poems so that their correct rhythm can be

heard, or, at least, read them with a defi-

nite beat.    

   Whether traditional poetry survives is

not just as academic question (as academia

has no interest in it). The fact that nobody

is concerned about it is chilling proof of how

far down the road we have gone towards

some dystopian anti-art world.

The celebration and rewarding of low-

effort art and thought, certainly discourages

serious effort by the truly talented. Good

art is hard to create, and takes time  to

execute. If it is not recognized and re-

warded, it will not be pursued. The skills

to create great things are lost when not

taught to the next generation but if prestige,

awards, and patronage were granted to

traditional-minded poets, artists, and

architects, I am sure that we would soon

see creations equal to the glories of the

past. Traditional poetry that rhymes, and

has rhythm, and is sung and transmitted

orally has to come back for the sake of

democracy, freedom, and civilization.

The dominance of free verse is based on

political, and not artistic, merit. Beauty,

logic, and the truth are things people will

always cherish, and I think people are

bound to demand that we return to real

art and good values as they are more

explicitly asked in the future to worship

and praise still more ugly and awful

things.

© C.A. MacLennan 2023

Videos of me reciting poems can

be found at: Poetry & Folklore - YouTube