It was in an Epoch Times newsroom, in July 2012, where my fellow reporter Joshua Philipp and I lamented the state of poetry today. We both had literary backgrounds and had separately come to the very same conclusion: Really good poetry just didn’t have a place to call home anymore.
By “really good poetry,” I am referring to well-written classical poetry, or what is sometimes called formal or traditional poetry. This is poetry written in the vein of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Frost.
These are poets whose lines spill out like sweet nectar from heaven, reverberating with rhythm and rhyme as they touch the palate on their way to the soul.
But I wax poetic. The key point is that modern free verse poetry was not what Josh and I were looking for. Undoubtedly, there are people who feel they gain something special from that brand of poetry, which is known today as free verse because it is free of any metrical rules or rhyme schemes. This branch of poetry holds names that are near and dear to many readers, such as Whitman, Pound, and T.S. Eliot.
“To each his own,” most people would say. But I had found that there was an important distinction to be made here. Those who were trumpeting freeness in their verse were also adamantly opposing classical verse—the defining foundation of poetry and the poetic experience—creating an environment that wasn’t free at all.
This was the situation in which the Society of Classical Poets was born: “Hey, we should start our own journal,” Josh said. “Yeah,” I replied, my eyes electrified.
“Even if you choose not to accept this, I just wanted to say thank you for having a Society like this! I’ve been getting pretty sick and tired of all the poetry websites/magazines that only feature free verse! The Society of the Classical Poets is like a breath of fresh air to me, so thank you!”
Since 2012, the Society has teamed with poets in the United Kingdom and grown into a nonprofit with participants around the world. Our website acts as an online poetry journal with poems, poetry translations into English, essays, reviews, and active comments sections. It receives millions of views every year.The Original Social Media Post
What is driving all of those interested readers to classical poetry? It’s the same thing that drives people to look at social media: a public two-way connection with their fellow human beings that often entails entertainment, insight, and inspiration.
In fact, throughout history, a poem has been social media; that is, it is social and it is a medium. A sonnet, a limerick, or a haiku is, at heart, a social media post or a meme.
Notably, though, where social media often drives social discourse lower, poetry tends to drive it higher, demanding economy of language, a command of metaphors, and a sustaining inspiration. While social media requires an internet connection, poetry requires only a pen and paper, and sometimes not even that.
While social media requires another set of eyes to have any meaning whatsoever, a poem can just exist on its own beautiful creativity, a thing unto itself, hence the many closet poets out there whom I have encountered in an endless stream.
These characteristics provide an eternal draw for poetry and mean that poetry will always appeal to literate people. William Shakespeare was very aware of the eternal nature of poetry. He wrote in his Sonnet XIX: “Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,/ My love shall in my verse ever live young.”
A Competition
On the flip side, one problem with poets being able to write poetry for the sake of the poetry itself is that they will purposely keep their poetry from the world out of fear and timidity.This leads to long-term problems. The quality of the poetry may very well go down when the poet purposely avoids interaction with others. Meanwhile, free verse has collected virtually all of the top awards and positions in the poetry world for decades.
To put it more poetically, classical poetry has lived mostly in a vast scattering of disconnected shadows, withering from lack of sun and badly in need of a tended garden bed.
In order to bring beautiful traditional culture back into the light, the Society of Classical Poets has made a focus of holding poetry challenges and competitions, each year building on the winning poems from the previous year as examples and providing free tutorials on the basics of classical poetry.
These efforts are crowned by one main competition in which poets from all over the world may enter recent poems on any topic. There is also a division for high school students.
Each year, a new first-place winner is awarded and the previous year’s first-place winner cannot compete. This provides the opportunity for more people to be part of the revival of classical poetry.
First-, second-, third-, and fourth-place winners, as well as honorable mentions, cover a wide range of tones in their poems—from deep contemplation to purely beautiful to hilariously funny—and a wide range of subjects: a Rembrandt painting, a house sale, Bible verses from Ecclesiastes, the singing of magpies, and the “High Cost of Low Prices,” to name a few. There is incredible vitality and variety to partake in.
Looking at the news today, one can feel helpless at the direction of culture. Reading a poem that you feel is good and commenting on it, or even writing one yourself, can immediately put you charge of the culture and its direction.
