The Question of Modern Poetry
By David Southward
What is modern poetry in 2025? When asked to speak on this daunting topic, my first impulse was to look back to 1925, the dawn of modern poetry in America, when the art was being transformed by nine Olympians: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, e. e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams. What exactly has changed about our poetry since their passing?
Artistic Motives
In terms of its artistic motives, the answer is “Not much.” Three broad tendencies still dominate our poetic output in 2025, which for simplicity’s sake I will dub the populist, the academic, and the avant-garde. Populist poets, following in the footsteps of Williams, Frost, and Hughes, write plainspoken verse about personal subjects (often with a moral or social significance) in an effort to reach the broadest possible audience. Their likes include Ted Kooser, Ross Gay, and Ada Limón. Academic poets, in the tradition of Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, challenge their readers with denser, often impersonal subject matter and more intricately allusive diction and form. Their ranks include Natasha Trethewey, A. E. Stallings, and Wisconsin’s own John Koethe. Avant-garde poets, bearing the torch of Crane and cummings, boldly contort language to test the boundaries of social convention or of consciousness itself. Among their best-known exemplars are Jorie Graham, Ocean Vuong, and Rae Armantrout. While most poets cross and combine elements of the populist, academic, and avant-garde in their work, these categories remain just as salient in 2025 as they were in 1925.
Perhaps the one dramatic change in the content of our poetry is its diversity. Whereas my 1925 pantheon included one woman and one person of color, American poetry now reflects the full rainbow of ethnic, cultural, and gender identities feeding the soul of our republic. That is all to the good. Along with this democratizing trend has come an all-but-total dominance of free verse. Whereas formal meter and rhyme were still the norm for poetry written in 1925 (making free verse sound truly revolutionary), meter and rhyme are now the outliers and free verse the standard.
Cultural Marketplace
More striking, however, than these changes in content and form are changes in what I will call the cultural marketplace of poetry. Let’s begin with publication and readership. 1925 saw the publication of approximately one new volume of poetry per day, meaning that it was just possible for the nation’s entire output of verse to be read by a single person. A conservative estimate for 2025 is that 27 new volumes appear daily—far beyond the capacities of any one reader to absorb. This creative explosion makes our poetry extremely difficult to assess and curate. We have no Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler reading fast enough to evaluate trends and point us to exemplary work. Not a single anthology of 21st century poetry can claim to be fully representative. Poetry criticism now consists mainly of reviewing—usually favorable reviews by fellow poets eager to be reviewed favorably in turn.
This timid reaction of poet-critics to the exponential increase in publications may stem from a fear of driving away readers. For although more poetry than ever is being written and published, all signs point to less poetry being read. Over decades of asking my undergraduates to list their favorite poets, I have repeatedly encountered the names of Poe, Plath, Shel Silverstein, occasionally Whitman, Dickinson, Ginsberg. Almost no student can name a single living poet; even Amanda Gorman seems to have been forgotten by overstimulated Gen Z. There exist too many other, flashier claims on people’s attention (including a downloadable archive of audiovisual media that was unthinkable in 1925) for any poet to compete with. Our poetry, it seems, is now read predominantly by other poets—and possibly even written for them.
Creative Writing Programs
The growing insularity of the poetry world may be related to another dramatic change since 1925: the institution of Creative Writing programs. Not until the late 1930s were the first MFAs in Creative Writing awarded (by the University of Iowa), launching an unprecedented wave of professionalization of the art form. Today more than 200 such programs exist, turning out thousands of graduates each year. Closely linked to these programs are the university presses, journals, and contests whose editorial boards confer prestige upon writers whose work they approve. Given the enormous influence of this educational-industrial complex over how we write and think about poetry, it is worth asking what its effect has been on the art form.
Initially the effect was a tonic one. The dawn of Creative Writing coincided with the rise of academic formalism, exemplified by the New Critics of the 1930s and ’40s, whose attention to detail and sophisticated theories of meaning helped to clear away the cobwebs of Victorian belletrism. Poetry, like prose, became more spare, objective, and ironic. Romantic sentimentality was washed away by scientific clarity. But as this newly disciplined approach hardened over time—into a bloodless and formulaic concern with “literary devices” that complicate and elevate meaning—poetry became less enjoyable. Interpreting it became a profession; reading it became a chore. No longer were students encouraged to memorize and savor poems for their beauty or nobility, but only to dissect them for their hidden symbolism. Poetry became a secret code shared by the initiated. No wonder it ceased to find readers.
At the same time, our society underwent a transformation in public discourse. Beginning with cinema and recorded music and accelerating with television and the internet, audiovisual media came to eclipse the written word. Hours formerly spent reading were now spent watching and listening. Traditional middle-class values of knowledge-seeking and self-improvement were replaced by pursuits of leisure, entertainment, and fandom. Fiction writing became more concrete and imagistic—unfolding in scenes and dialogue much like a film—and journalism stripped language of all complexity and ambiguity. As our abstract vocabulary shrank, the usage of slang and profanity surged. It is no accident that the most notable innovations in poetry of the last century, spoken word and rap lyric, emphasize oral delivery of frank, explicit language. Young poets understandably hunger to speak in the idioms of their time.
My purpose in sketching this history is not to pass judgment on it. I wish only to acknowledge the facts, so that we may ask ourselves with open eyes: where does poetry go from here? I will conclude with a few of my own ideas about that.
Where Does Poetry Go From Here
Our poetry could delve more into narrative and drama. If Homer could unite a culture around stories of war and its aftermath, and Shakespeare could populate plays with the full gamut of a nation’s voices, what prevents modern poets from doing the same? Our poetry has been mostly intimate and personal since the Romantic era of Wordsworth; isn’t it time we moved on—not backward, but forward—to more ambitious experiments in storytelling with multiple voices? At the same time, there is room for exploration of song in our verse. Even metrical poetry now shies away from the use of refrain and short lines favored in traditional lyrics. Songwriting, which blossomed during the folk and classic-rock renaissance of the 1960s and 70s—making possible Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature—has languished under the profiteering influence of record labels and Spotify. Poets could help to reinvigorate America’s musical language, showing how songs can be both popular and poetic. Lastly, our poetry could focus on serving its audience better. People crave verse that speaks not only to them, but for them, voicing their deepest beliefs and passions and awakening their faith in human connection. Much of today’s poetry, by contrast, is private, inward-looking, rueful, solitary, sad. Its whispered agonies and epiphanies may not galvanize readers the way that Shakespeare’s civic mythology once did.
Obviously there is more to say on the vast question of modern poetry. I appreciate this opportunity to share my thoughts about it and hope we can continue the conversation at future gatherings of our Fellowship.wn
David Southward grew up in southwest Florida and earned degrees in English from Northwestern and Yale Universities. In 1998 he joined the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he currently teaches courses in literature and graphic arts. David’s publications include Apocrypha, a sonnet sequence based on the Gospels (Wipf & Stock 2018), and the collections Bachelor's Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020) and Queer Physics (Kelsay Books 2025)”. David is a two-time winner of the Lorine Niedecker Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and in 2019 his poem "Mary's Visit" won the $1,000 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. David resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff, and their two beagles.