SUNDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2025

There’s nothing I enjoy more than penning a diatribe about what I see as the failings of much of the contemporary poetry I come across online. But I’ll do my best not to rant today. I’ll try to explain in a more measured way why I find it so difficult to warm to a lot of this work. My key problem is that I often feel marooned as I make my way through a poem. There seems nothing for me to hang on to. I often feel as if I’m reading a list or browsing through a catalogue.

I would distinguish here between two basic approaches to poetry. The first is looser, less strictly disciplined, and moves outwards. It’s expansive and open. The second folds in on itself like a flower. It’s concise and the structure is much tighter and clearly signalled through techniques such as rhyme and metre. Borrowing terms I have found online (although they seem far from common), I’ll call the first centrifugal and the second centripetal. From my google trawl, it seems the former has been used by scholars discussing biblical poetry while the latter has been used to describe the work of Yeats. In this essay, Whitman can serve as an example of the centrifugal and Frost of the centripetal.

Centrifugal poetry tends to eschew rhyme and consistent metre, and in terms of content it accumulates a succession of images as the poem progresses. Its most common structural device is anaphora at the beginning of lines. Centripetal poetry often uses rhyme and metre as an anchor and is generally based around one or two key metaphors or symbols which are woven into the poem throughout the verse.

Thus, in I Hear America Singing, Whitman begins each line with a person － mechanic, carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker, wood-cutter, mother － and strengthens this by repetition of the word ‘singing’, plus other repeated phrases such as ‘as he + verb’ and ‘or + prepositional phrase’. If at times I have in other essays unfairly accused contemporary poets of creating a ‘catalog’, this word (and also ‘list’) have been used by analysts of Whitman’s work. But his listing in the poem discussed here has an internal logic. It isn’t just a random collection of disparate images.

In The Road Not Taken, in contrast, Frost uses a consistent ABAAB rhyming pattern in each of the four stanzas. The metre is complex and not restricted to iambs, but there is an underlying regularity largely missing from the Whitman. Thematically, the poem is exceedingly tight, hardly straying from the central symbol of a fork in a road as a metaphor for a major choice in someone’s life. In that sense, and only in that sense, it is very simple.

I am not arguing that the Frost is better than the Whitman － which of the poems you prefer, if either, is clearly a matter of personal choice. My taste is for the latter, but I accept that the Whitman has a clear structure and is not merely prose masquerading as poetry. My gripe is that I often read attacks on poets who do Frost badly － whose rhymes clunk, whose rhythm becomes tedious and predictable, and who twist grammar unnaturally in order to fit the metre － but I almost never read any criticism of people who do Whitman badly. And there are lots of them.

My argument is that bad Whitman is just as frequent and damaging as bad Frost, all the more so since few poets seem to write in anything but free verse nowadays, but this poor quality is almost never called out. For example, instead of Whitman’s variations on a theme (people in their different social roles) in I Hear America Singing, many contemporary poems pile up random images one after another with no obvious connection to link them thematically. It is like a sales catalogue where different items for sale － a pair of shoes, a filing cabinet, a tin of soup, a mattress － are placed randomly together on the same page.

Another common problem is verbosity: a lot of contemporary poets don’t know when it’s time to end the poem (I’d personally argue that Whitman was also guilty of this at times). So the verses multiply, and the images pile up, but the poem as a whole goes nowhere: it is an accumulation rather than a coherent statement. The same ideas could be expressed in a fraction of the number of lines.

It is unfair, though, when people who call themselves traditionalists accuse Whitman of destroying what they consider to be traditional poetry. The roots of poetry in the west are oral and based on narrative, so Whitman’s verse is closer in many ways to these origins. It’s also worth stressing that Whitman was deliberately and consciously borrowing from the use of language in the Bible, a language which underpins much of English-speaking poetry. In many ways, it is the careful verse of Frost or Yeats which is a movement away from the roots of western poetry, even if the written tradition they write within also began a long time ago. The kind of tight-knit poem that Frost or Yeats wrote could not have existed before mass printing other than for a privileged elite because the nuances of language that only register when we get the chance to read a poem again and again aren’t possible in an oral tradition. We hear it and move on, swayed by the delivery of the speaker as much as by the poet’s exact choice of words.

If the roots of poetry indeed lie in narrative, this may be one of the reasons why contemporary free verse poems are so often based on a personal vignette or a journey, using narrative as a structural device in the absence of technical features such as rhyme. Obviously these narratives are much shorter and tend to have more internal psychological content than the epics of the classical period or the sagas, but a story or a journey of some sort is used to provide the structural framework that the poem would otherwise lack. In the absence of rhyme and metre, the story takes us by the hand and guides us through the poem, at least if it is written well.

Spoken aloud － and let’s not forget that Whitman believed that poetry should be spoken aloud rather than read on the page － Whitman’s style of poetry can be enormously powerful, and perhaps in an age where film and the internet have made video more central to our daily lives than the written word, it is not surprising that variations on his style remain so popular in the contemporary scene. In America, certainly, his free-ranging model has largely become the norm.

I just wish the same high standards were demanded of centrifugal poems that are demanded of centripetal ones. There is room for both in the world.