For most folk, famous poems are examples of traditional
poetry, i.e. "proper poetry" because it rhymes and
scans.
More professional poets might call themselves traditional
on the basis of a. content, b. technique and/or c. conceptions
of what poetry is. Some Modernists
were traditional in content but not in technique, and many
Postmodernists
employ traditional techniques to mock the traditional
purposes of art. The upshot? Most poetry today is as most
always has been: conventional but dressed in the appropriate
styles and 'isms'.
Traditional poetry fell out of favour for
many (not always valid or compelling) reasons that can
be grouped under a. usual reaction to literary elders, b.
attempts to better represent the contemporary
world, c. desire to copy the sciences
by experimentation, d. retreat into a fragmentary
interior existence, and e. inverted social
or intellectual snobbery. Nonetheless, against a dominant
20th century trend towards free verse,
traditional poetry made periodic returns in the Georgians,
Neo-romantics,
Movement
poets and the New
Formalists.
Recommend a few books?
Good introductions
to the style of famous poems are: The Poetry Handbook
by J. Lennard (1996), Reading Poetry: An Introduction
by T. Furniss and M. Bath (1996), The Making of a Poem:
A Norton Anthology of Poetic Form By M. Stroud and E.
Boland (2000), The
Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry
(1997) by Jon Silkin, The Poem's Heartbeat by A. Corn
(1998), A History of Modern Poetry (1987) by David
Perkins, The
Origins of Free Verse(1998) by H.T Kirby-Smith and
Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against
Meter (1990) by T. Steele. Useful bibliographies follow
the American Poetry and Free Verse entries in
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(1993). A modern anthology of traditional verse is P. Dacey
and D. Jauss's Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry
in Traditional Forms (1986). For the polemics surrounding
New Formalism see Joseph
Salemi and Ira
Sadoff.
