Just when poetry became "modern" is not easy to determine.
today i sat complacent in my bathroom
It is necessary to pursue less a moment
when out of the mist loomed a sudden quote
than a context -- intellectual and social --
and i was thrown into a struggle.
in which the innovations we call modern have occurred.
i strove all day to tame imagination:
Such a search leads,
to work and back
paradoxically perhaps,
chopping hard-boiled eggs and peppers in my mind
back to the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century.
wondering what it all meant
Romanticism was influential in the arts and in society as well;
and whether it said at all what it meant to say.
before it, poetry
is imagination individual or social? i too am a poet
more often than not
and think either idea may be some new social sin.
had celebrated the ideals of the society
why, for example, are those pre-romantics
to which the poet belonged,
seen and admired but subtly pitied
but Romanticism offered sanction
like pandas or boas at the zoo,
for a more copious and diversified expression of the self,
or who's to say this sanction
for more various relations between the individual and society.
is not a jail cell in itself?
An element of subversion is probably present
(of course it's present!)
in all great poets, but not until
you do not know, dear authors
individuality came to be seen as positive,
the celebration neccessitates a certain distance
rather than eccentric or antisocial,
potentially subversive in itself and of itself
did the conception of the guerilla poet --
and why does levertov ring in my ears?
outcast, victim, misfit, radical
just the other day, on page 1058 of this self-same anthology:
-- achieve heroic consequence.
"what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth?"
~ Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair, Introduction,
i know that you are wise
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
perhaps i simply have not seized your distinction.
W. W. Norton. New York: 1973