POETRY TRADITION

Poets create literary history and tradition by using and passing on poetic structures and ideas about life and art from generation to generation. Although great poetry is sometimes said to be timeless, poets think of their writing as part of history (including literary history), and they intentionally imitate earlier poets. The idea that a poem should be original is a relatively recent development, dating from English romantic poets of the early 19th century. In fact many avant-garde experimenters of the 20th century—poets seeking to break with existing conventions of poetry—have turned their attention to ancient poetries or to oral practices that continue today. The word “original” contains the word “origin—”and for the modern poet the search for new poetic forms is often a matter of looking back at the past ones. Prior to the 19th-century emphasis on the original, imitation of earlier models was not only acceptable but was the standard way of learning to write poetry and becoming a poet in other people’s eyes. Even in the New World Canadian (both French and English) and American poetry began with poets asserting their voices by writing in the forms of European and English poetry (see Canadian Literature; American Literature:Poetry).

For poets of the English Renaissance, from about 1485 to 1660, the imitation of classical Greek and Roman poets was a way of earning a place in the lineage of that early artistic and philosophical culture that had glorified the human image in art and writing. Finding their roots in this earlier era was a crucial step for the English poets. They wanted to show how their art was different than that of the medieval period that preceded the Renaissance. At that time, the medieval period was viewed as a dark age in which the glorious culture of the ancients had been lost. Over the ages many poets have found writing in traditional forms a means of “talking” to poets of the past, both to acknowledge what they have learned from them and to add their own voices to the tradition. Among poets continuing this convention in their own ways, the English late–19th- and early-20th-century poet A.E. Housman and the 20th-century Canadian experimental poet Anne Carson, both classical scholars, juxtaposed ancient and modern to jolt the reader into seeing the continuities of tradition.

Within a given culture a conventional image—an image with a long history—reminds people of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that have collected around that image over time. For example, one of the most common Western images in poetry is the moon. It is also a common image in Eastern poetry but carries different meanings. In Greek and Roman myth, in which Western culture originated, the moon was associated with the goddess Artemis (called Diana by the Romans). This hunter and virgin rejected men, preferring to roam the woods alone or with bands of female followers, all of whom were required to renounce male companionship. This association, along with the moon's shifting shapes, led to a shared understanding of the moon as an image of women’s indifference, changeability, elusiveness, and inconstancy. Even when not attached specifically to a particular woman, the image evoked a principle of change and flux that was thought of as essentially feminine. Knowledge of these conventional meanings helps a reader understand their familiar uses as well as cases in which a poem is deliberately questioning or opposing them. The modernist American poet Wallace Stevens voiced his urgent longing to step outside traditional ways of perceiving reality, to see “the moon/and not the image of the moon.” American Sylvia Plath ends her final poem, “Edge ”(1963), with a frightening reworking of the convention: “The moon has nothing to be sad about/staring from her hood of bone.//She is used to this sort of thing./Her blacks crackle and drag.”

Here, the moon's traditional changeableness hardens into a cold and uncaring aloofness. Feminist literary critics, who specialize in writing about women’s place within and outside of literary traditions, have suggested that Plath's suicide at the age of 30 may have been connected to her struggle to be too many women at once—an independent artist, a support to her poet-husband, a mother, a well-known poet, and a kind of prophet. The harshness of the moon in this poem may reflect Plath’s bitter self-condemnation. As a witness, the moon offers not sorrow or sympathy for the woman speaker in the poem, but icy indifference. While familiarity with the conventional image is not necessary to feel the power and emotional violence of this moment when we read the poem, the more we know about the social and cultural context in which it was written, the more we see in the image.

The following sections survey some of the ways that a tradition of poetry has evolved by looking at the conventions of particular poetic forms: iambic pentameter verse in English, the English sonnet, the Japanese haiku, the Persian/Arabic ghazal, the Swahili tendi, and Native American Song.