4 contemporary poetry
regarding the evolution of poetic forms, conceptualisation of the
poets’ ideas through essays and manifestos, and a critical consensus
regarding tendencies in recent contemporary poetry. But in order
to understand what the implications of what being ‘contemporary’
might mean for poetry written since the 1960 s, it is important that
we broach initially what we can understand by a ‘poetics’, as well as
some important historical precedents, tendencies and movements
that impacted upon the writing of contemporary poetry in English.
POETICS?
Jerome McGann in a recent collection of his essays on poetry The
Point is to Change It ( 2007 ) identifi es his central concern: ‘this book
is about the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. When
their dispute involves a claim to critical thinking, the question is
usually decided in favour of philosophy’.^10 It is useful to consider
‘poetics’ as a philosophy of poetry, the thinking of the art of poetic
composition. Key early philosophers and thinkers whose work is
associated with the creation and discussion of a poetics would be of
course Aristotle, Horace and Dante. The New Princeton Dictionary
of Poetry and Poetics states that poetics is at its most specifi c ‘a sys-
tematic theory of poetry’. Poetics in effect ‘attempts to defi ne the
nature of poetry, its kinds and forms, its resources of device and
structure, the principles that govern it from other arts, the condi-
tions under which it can exist, and its effects on readers or audi-
tors’.^11 M. H. Abrams, writing in 1953 , identifi ed four directions
that poetic theories address:
Toward the work itself (objective or formalist theories),
toward the audience (pragmatic or affective theories), toward
the world (mimetic or realistic theories) and toward the poet
creator (expressive or romantic theories).^12Remarking on the momentum of twentieth-century philosophy
with its post-World War II emphasis on language philosophy
and the impact of French deconstruction, McGann suggests that
poetic writing found itself suddenly in favour: ‘this kind of writing