The problem with poetry

[Luckieman]

I was having a bit of a rant but yes, the weariness is not new, it dates back to the late nineteenth century. The search for freshness that drove Gauguin to Tahiti (apart from the freedom to have multiple wives) was born of the same sense that there’s nothing new to say.

That’s why literature from the late nineteenth onwards reads so fresh still. Maybe even the mid. But pre French Revolution, the britches are over starched.

It dates back to the 16th century, if not earlier. See Gregory Leadbetter,  'The Mother of Lies?' in Rishi Dastidar's The Craft (Nine Arches Press 2019). However I'm a firm believer in live and let live. There's an old Russian proverb: O vkusakh ne sporyat (they don't argue about tastes), so I strongly believe that criticism should restrict itself to technical errors and the appropriateness of technique and craft to the author's message and leave the message itself to the author. They're the one after all who knows what they're trying to say, and it's not for us to try to change their mind about that. I remember an agonised plea by a young poet on another forum who submitted a poem for review, and it came back amended, saying something quite different from what she'd intended. It's maybe worth considering as well that style and form are matters of taste so we shouldn't be condemning for their selection, merely commenting on how well they've been implemented.

And as to the weariness - given that humans have been thinking and creating for quite probably a million or so years and that there are now billions of us still thinking and creating, it's not realistic to consider that we can all be novel all the time. The aim should be to express what is interesting (even if familiar) to the reader in interesting ways. Trying to be consciously original elevates the author above the work, which is ultimately unimportant to the reader, if not an actual turn-off. In any case, being original doesn't mean doing something nobody has done before, it means coming up with something using your own devices rather than following some external model. It's still original for each, even if other folk have come up with the same thing. The originality will be in subtle differences due to each of us having unique experiences and thought processes, but will only be noticed by the perceptive observer.

And above all, we should all avoid blanket condemnation of specific techniques or vocabulary, as that merely verges on prejudice.