Contemporary poems and their ornamental ancestors.

Contemporary poems are as poetic as their ornamental ancestors.

Contemporary poems are characterized by their own originality, their intrinsic creativity and the presence of poetic elements just like classic poems.

In “an Elegy for W.C.W., the Lovely Man” by John Berryman, the similarity of sounds that constitute the end rhyme is noticeable. For example, in the third stanza, the end rhyme consists of the words ahead and read; down and crown as follow:

“Too many journey lie for him ahead,
too many galleys & page-proofs to be read,
he would like to lie down
in your sweet silence, to whom was not denied
the mysterious late excellence which is the crown
of our trials & our last bride”

In addition, a contemporary poem can use matter of sounds just like does a classic poem. For example in “The Waking”, the extreme use of the assonance is profusely exploited by Theodore Roethke. The vowel sound [A] for example is redundant in the lines 17 and 18:

“What falls away is always. And is near
I wake to sleep and take my walking slow”

Furthermore, contemporary poems are partitioned in tercet, quatrain, and recurrent stanza like the classic poems. Moreover, they sometimes adopt the free verse style, pioneered earlier by the school of “Imagism” which authorizes and validates the violation of the grammar rules and the use of fragmented sentences or words in Poetry. An example is in this second stanza of “I know a Man” by Robert Creeley where the word “said” is abbreviated to “sd” and where all lines begin with a small case letter:

“sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what”.