Modern poets are those who have decided that the secret of writing verse is not to write verse but to chop up prose and distribute the pieces unfairly
So that
One line may contain a great many syllables,
And another,
One.
In order to stop modern poets sneering at you as they roll their cigarettes or massage their stubble, you should be able to speak earnestly about the various types of modern poetry. It isn’t difficult: just think of almost any word that ends in -ism (except rheumatism or criticism) and throw it into the conversation as you would beansprouts into a wok – Symbolism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Existentialism, Surrealism, Movementism, New Formalism. It helps, of course, if you have some vague idea as to what these terms mean, and many of them, though not all, do have a meaning.
SYMBOLISM
Founder Baudelaire.
Proponents Mallarmé and Verlaine – not a French department store, but two poets. An enormous number of Russian poets, all of whose first names begin with V: Vladimir Solovyov, Valery Bryusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Etceterov.
Period 1880 to 1890s.
Characteristics The symbol is ‘the verbal parallel to a pattern of experience’ (Kenneth Burke, US critic). The aim of Symbolism is to evoke, rather than describe.
Technique Impressions, intuitions, sensations. All the Symbolists did was to liken life to objects – life is a clockwork toy, a raspberry jelly, a chicken nugget...
CONCRETE POETRY
Founder Apollinaire.
Proponents Too many to list – the best-known British concrete poet is probably Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Period 1900 to present.
Characteristics Emphasis on the physical existence of the poem – what it’s written or printed on, the typography used, any artistic embellishments or decorations. Sometimes accompanied by music – this is invariably the worst type.
Technique To build rather than to write a poem. Since it may be carved in stone or wood, or have metal words welded together, this is a poem you can actually own and stick in your garden.
IMAGISM
Founder Ezra Pound.
Proponents Richard Aldington, ‘HD’ (Hilda Doolittle – nothing to do with the Doctor), FS Flint (nothing to do with the Captain), Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford (extra points if you refer to him as Ford Madox Hueffer), Allen Upward and John Cournos.
Period 1910 to 1918 (renewed briefly in the late 1920s).
Characteristics Anglo-American. Influenced by the Chinese, Japanese and early Greeks. Purity of diction. Mercifully small poems. Precision of imagery (hence ‘Imagism’).
Technique ‘Direct treatment of “the thing’’, whether subjective or objective; to use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation; as regarding rhythm – to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome’ (Poetry [US magazine] March 1913). It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what this means; no one would dare ask you to explain.
VORTICISM
Founder Wyndham Lewis.
Proponent Wyndham Lewis, although the term was coined by Ezra Pound.
Period 1914-1915 (it didn’t really capture the Zeitgeist).
Characteristic A kind of literary Cubism in which all art was to be related to the machine and modern industrialisation.
Technique Egocentric concern for Wyndham Lewis.
DADAISM
Founder Tristan Tzara.
Proponents Few, though the Sitwells show a little light-hearted influence.
Period 1917 to 1922.
Characteristics The aim of Dada was to be destructive and to deny sense and order, to suppress all logical relationship between ideas by violence and/or a savage, comic irony.
Technique Sit down, write anything you like and eventually an idea or theme will emerge. A godsend, therefore, to all of us without talent. It’s a wonder the movement lasted only five years.
EXISTENTIALISM
Founder Kierkegaard, though there have been existential punch-ups between supporters of rival candidates, and those who assert that Existentialism can’t have a founder.
Proponents The philosophers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus and Karl Jaspers. Unfortunately for Existentialism (but perhaps fortunately for us) there have been few out-and-out Existentialist poets, although some enthusiasts have tried to claim Samuel Beckett and Charles Bukowski among their number.
Period 1920s to the present.
Characteristics Emphasis on the uniqueness of human experience and essential individuality of life. French flavour, eclectic, full of disgust for the world. Concerned with feelings, most of them unpleasant.
Technique Most existential writing has to include:
a) someone dying, preferably of the meaninglessness of life or from suppurating boils
b) someone being sick
c) someone being bored out of his or her mind
d) someone being hideously poor
e) everyone contemplating suicide.
SURREALISM
Founder Offshoot of the Dadaists.
Proponents (In England) David Gascoyne, Francis Scarfe, Roger Roughton, Philip O’Connor. (In France) André Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon. Also big in Spain.
Period Mid-1920s to mid-1930s.
Characteristics Hatred of the prevailing system, exploration of the unconscious mind, rational principles, depiction of disembodied male or female genitalia in incongruous settings as if this is a) clever and b) deep.
Technique Automatic writing (as in Dadaism).
MOVEMENTISM
Not strictly a term at all; most people refer to it as The Movement.
Founder Not so much founded, as a term coined in 1954 by JD Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers who reacted to the (as they saw it) overblown romanticism of poets such as Dylan Thomas.
Proponents Philip Larkin, John Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest, Thom Gunn, Kingsley Amis.
Period 1950s to the mid-1960s, although New Formalism, a movement in the USA in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which favours a return to metred and rhymed poetry, is highly influenced by it, and by the poetry of Larkin in particular.
Characteristics Tough, ironic, accessible, unsentimental.
Technique Use of precise language and a rejection of the overblown, flowery phrases of Romanticism. The Movement seems finally to have broken the Ancient Greek yoke that had previously bruised the shoulders of English poetry from Chaucer to Rupert Brooke.
NEW FORMALISM
See Movementism.
BLUFFISM
If you’ve got this far, this needs no further explanation.