Poetry in this country is ready for something new. We are at the start of a century, and that, in the past, has marked new beginnings for the art. Pound and Eliot launched Modernism in the opening years of the twentieth century, in the pages of this magazine. And in the opening years of the nineteenth, 1802 to be exact, Wordsworth launched poetry’s Romantic era with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The centennial calendar does not go further back. The early years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not mark new departures for English poetry. And American poetry found its true beginnings in Whitman and Dickinson, who did their writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, not at either end.)
But it’s not really a matter of calendar. American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now.
more from Poetry Magazine here.