Prissy Harvard Scholars and Such Like

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

It used to be that poetry was sung

By nightingales and skylarks in the lines

Of Keats and Shelley.  Shimmering odes were flung

Out from Romantic hearts that used the mines

Of beauty for the singing.  Then a frog

Began a-croaking about etherized

Flat patients in a table scene.  A smog

Enveloped poetry.  The smog was prized

By those who hated loveliness.  They loved

The fact that footnotes, all arcane, became

The modus operandi and were shoved

At us instead by men who had no shame.

  Both Eliot and Pound and all that lot

    Tied reading up as a Gordian knot.