We want to publish high quality formal, metric poetry. We are hoping to publish here online twice a year. If you have some work you’d like to see in this journal send it to: jimatshs@yahoo.com We will try to respond within a month. And thank you.
Now your other co-host introduces himself with a rant over post-modernism.
. . . Before the cataclysm of World War One, poetry had form because life had form. There were things we were certain of, like right and wrong and what life meant. Two world wars and a whole lot of bad philosophy turned that around. We decided that the insanity of modern industrial war was caused by the sanity of past ages, so we chucked them for a new form of insanity. Swift move, that one. About as logical as reacting against a spot of dirt on your clean shirt by bathing in a mud hole. For eighty-nine years now we’ve wallowed in the mud hole of Modern then Postmodern angst. But it’s a whole new century. . . .
Your co-host introduces himself with a story of his own introduction to poetry.
I had seen something about the human condition: how the passage of time forces choices upon us and makes them matter; how it makes our experiences of Nature’s beauty ephemeral and doubly poignant in that they are fleeting and hard to grasp or preserve, and for that very reason the more to be valued; how these two effects of living in time are somehow related. I chewed on it during the ride back home, but could not then put it even into such words as I have just used. . . .
The obvious question is, why formal poetry? Didn’t that go out? Why do we want to go back to that stuff? Isn’t free verse freer?
Well, there is one main assumption that underlies those questions, that we here at The Road Not Taken would question, and that is the assumption that somehow poetry, and society is evolving into ever better and higher forms. That what is past is archaic and has been replaced by what is better. . . .
First written in 1811[-1814] when he was about 17[-20], Bryant enlarged "Thanatopsis" in 1821, [approximately] 7 years later, adding the final injunction and giving the poem a kind of religious point.
Due to the unusual quality of the verse and Bryant's age when first published in 1817 by the North American Review, Richard Henry Dana, then associate editor at the Review, initially doubted its authenticity, saying to another editor, No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses.
