Alpine Summer

I tend to hate the British Romantic poets. Ok, that's not fair. Revision: I tend to hate William Wordsworth. I understand his importance to all of poetry since his existence, I understand that what I write would not be considered poetry if it were not from him. Though I can't help but think that somebody else would have thought of some of that stuff if he didn't. I mean, how much longer could the heroic couplet have stayed popular? He championed the idea of poetry being written in the common tongue so it would be accessible by all. But, William Blake before him had a similar idea: he wrote "for children", knowing that adults would read it and understand what he was saying about hypocritical religions, slavery, racism, child labour, etc. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued with Wordsworth (( they were best buds )) that poetry will always have a language of its own.

In their lifetime, Coleridge was right. While Wordsworth struggled to make it sound like the common man speaking, he still cheated with the poetic "ere"s and "oer"s. Today, a lot of poetry has moved very close to the voice of the people. Or specific people. In fact, that's one of the criteria for a good poem, in many senses. "Is the voice we hear authentic?" "Is that the type of language this person would use?" "Who do we hear in this poem?" It isn't necessarily the "common man", but, in many cases, it is. This makes it accessible for the non-poetry readers, but it still arguably has a poem-y feeling.

Studying prose poetry in Creative Writing, the question was often raised: "Yeah, but what makes this a poem and not just a paragraph? It looks like a paragraph to me." And the only answer is: listen to it. Listen to that paragraph. Poetry has music. Sometimes it's grating, middle-school band music, but sometimes that's what it has to be. And sometimes it's a symphony.