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Introduction to The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry © 2005 [11]
4 As the moon's light from the Pleiades sets, Richard Vallance. Sappho's Odes I (2005) The Second and Third Neo-Romantic Waves In Section A of this introduction, we visited the first so-called "Neo-Romantic" wave of the early twentieth century. We believe we have now entered a second Neo-Romantic wave in the early Third Millennium and are not surprisingly, given the rapid global spread of the Internet, surfing it. It cannot be stressed enough that this second wave of Neo-Romanticism has the potential to exert far more reaching effects on future generations of poets than the ephemeral first Neo-Romantic wave of the early twentieth century, if only for the reason that the World Wide Web affords the second wave a leavening medium and an active instrument for its swift dissemination throughout the world, now a global village. Put another way, the second wave of Neo-Romanticism is likely catching on, igniting like a brush fire around the globe. The first wave of Neo-Romanticism was soon enough eclipsed in the ashes of World War I as the poetry of angst and alienation of the Depression began to spread it tentacles throughout Western literature. By the mid-twentieth century, the horrors of World War II, the atomic bomb, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and god knows how many other wars and revolts littering the previous century had had thoroughly eclipsed those of World War I. Twentieth century poets, in their headlong rush to court popularity by writing "in" poetry reflecting the dour mood of the age, all but submerged the few straggling vestiges of the first wavelet of Neo-Romanticism that struggled in vain to gain an audience, however paltry.
Plague of Despair (20th. century), photo by Richard Vallance Neo-Romanticism in the Early Third Millennium In our own day and age, the second wave of Neo-Romanticism is the birth child of a completely novel phenomenon, namely; the globalizing and intercommunicative role the Internet plays in bringing people together from all around the world, by encouraging them to share and work co-operatively as one human community. This altogether novel historical phenomenon applies to poetry and poets the world over as profoundly as it does to all other fields of human endeavour and knowledge. The great psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), seemed to have nourished the hope that international co-operative efforts would perhaps some day bring poets the world over closer together. For in 1966 a posthumous review of his writings quoted his prophetic assertion concerning the communal need for writers, poets and their readers alike to... ... realize when we let a work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it shaped him. Then we also understand the nature of his primordial experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate his feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole (italics mine) [10]. Touché. How could I have possibly expressed it better? There's our thesis in a nutshell. I truly believe all of us around the world collectively stand on the threshold of just such a sweeping revelation in international literature and poetry at the outset of the Third Millennium. It would appear that C.G. Jung's words were indeed prophetic. Let's take this one step further. Like the plague of despair and angst which so suffused most of the poetry of the twentieth century, the global impact of this unheard of historical development is just as all pervasive, though almost diametrically opposed in its spirit and in its socio-cultural effects. In the twentieth century, poets could blithely wallow in their own black holes of despair and social alienation. Today, few poets can still afford to scribble away in their solipsistic literary voids. We are everywhere being invited "out of our closets" to share, communicate, cross-fertilize and inspire one another in all our poetic endeavours in novel ways that even the fertile Renaissance and Romantic Eras could not have dared dream of. Now it's our turn to mesmerize the world. Hard on the heels of women's, black and gay liberation, is the first decade of the Third Millennium destined to herald the era of "Poets' liberation"? Let's cross our fingers. The Internet may just prove to be the leavening medium for the all-out globalization of poetry for the first time in human history. Sooner rather than later, it may very well make poetry more accessible to many more diversified audiences than ever before in human history. There are signpost indicators symptomatic of this renewal in early twenty-first century poetry. Some of the more notable of these are: 1. We are witnessing the surprising return of rhythmical metric, musically inspired and even rhymed verse to the forefront after at least a half century when such formal poetry fell into decline and neglect and sometimes outright disrepute, in the headlong rush to the ever popular free-and-easy "free verse". Sadly, as we all know only too well, the latter method of versification has laid itself open to all sorts of pitfalls, not to say the least lackadaisical, even slipshod poetry writing. This is not to say that the best free verse of the twentieth century is not great verse. It decidedly is. But, as any accomplished poet knows only too well, in order to be able to compose really striking free verse, you had better be one hell of a poet. In fact, the greatest of "free verse" poets have always been highly disciplined poets thoroughly versed in metrics, the dictates of rhythm and in the exigencies imposed by formal verse. On the other hand, for every great poem composed in free verse there are tens of thousands of "free verse" poems which amount to nothing much more than doggerel or dressed up sloppy prose. Where is the discipline in such writing? Largely in absentia. This much explains, at least in part, why some of our more enlightened contemporary poets at the outset of the twenty-first century are more than willing to take the plunge and experiment yet again with disciplined verse forms, including the sonnet. After all, what have we got to lose? And we've plenty to gain by re-embracing the tried and tested disciplinae poeticae of the past. 2. This may account in part for the unlikely resurrection of the sonnet, the quatrain, the villanelle and other formal verse genres, all of which were pronounced by certain academic critics just a few decades ago as about to take to their death beds. By 1960, we were loudly proclaiming, "God is dead... so too is the sonnet. Amen." But, as we seem to be rediscovering in the early Third Millennium, God (or some playful unseen mysterious force pervading our miserable human existence) is not necessarily dead at all. Judging from the sheer number of poets from around the world today again writing sonnets, it would appear that the genre has come almost full circle from the high Romantic Era and is coming back in vogue, and is, as we say nowadays, "cool". 3. There's simply no denying the nihilistic poetry of angst and alienation so characteristic of the twentieth century "scene" continues to be pumped out on a massive scale. After all, we do live in particularly violent times, especially after 9/11/2001. Yet, strangely enough, although such bleak sensationalist poetry remains hugely popular with diverse audiences hungry for a "New Age" rush, a psychological fix at any cost, its compelling influence seems to be inexplicably on the wane. Or is this trend so inexplicable? Surely by now in late 2005, and with each passing year, it is becoming more and more apparent that many of the more socially conscious littérateurs in Western society are getting downright fed up to the rafters with the endemic violence and collapse of socio-cultural values that have so deeply permeated it since at least 1914. This is not to say that we are in any position to cure it, at least not without some overriding universal ethical principles or (heaven forbid I should venture to claim), without some compelling spiritual intervention, possibly even from someone as remote as (God forbid!) God. History has proven over and over, with relentless irony, that humanity has never been able to "solve", let alone confront its own massive problems at any level. Like it or lump it, the conundrum stubbornly persists. No literary renascence, not even the likes of the Renaissance or the Romantic Era, has ever been able to lift humanity out of our long inherited spiritual morass, nor is it likely the present renewal will, however valiantly we may try . Still, try we must and shall, for the will to overcome apparently insurmountable spiritual odds is also deeply ingrained in human nature. At any event, plenty of modern writers and poets in our increasingly globalizing human society have just about had it up to here with such nihilism. This is not to deny that alienation and angst must continue to play a vital role in the "new" poetry of the early Third Millennium. But it is this editor's confirmed belief that, by and large we, the newest generation of poets of the first decade of this century, prefer to submerge our own despair and disillusionment, however rampant it may be, under far more pressing social, personal, emotional and (dare I say the word?) spiritual concerns. In this sense alone, is our poetry, the poetry of the early Third Millennium, again destined to be steeped in the values of a pervasive, even visible literary renewal? And if it be so, why not gladly espouse our higher common denominator, "the second wave of Neo-Romanticism", if we must serve it with a name? Ainsi soit-il. Amen. 4. As of the first decade of the twenty-first century, many literary critics have come to reach a consensus of sorts that "the Lake Poets" of early nineteenth century England (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats et al.) struggled valiantly to overthrow the overriding social and normative literary values of Neo-Classical eighteenth century poetry, and were largely successful in so doing. That is quite a sweeping literary and socio-cultural achievement, not to say revolution, especially in light of the tentative conclusion I have just drawn: that we, as humanity, are perpetually condemned to relive the spiritual sins of our past. Paradox it may be. But I am often given to espousing paradoxes. After all, we poets really value the élan vital of that elusive spiritual pathos that "defines" us as humanity. It is to be fervently hoped that the poets in this anthology at least will be seen by future generations as the exemplars of a similar marked revolution in humanistic values expressed through our own poetry at all levels, personal, psychological, emotional and spiritual, over and against the nihilistic world views all too often swallowed whole on blind faith by all too many disillusioned twentieth century poets. Today, in the timeline of the evolution of poetry, the living, vibrant human process of poetics appears at last to be on a road to abandoning the marked tendencies towards meaninglessness in twentieth century poetry in favour of a more deep-rooted human desire for meaningfulness in the poetry of our own era. Are we returning to the fold of centuries old, tried and tested effective modes of poetic expression such as organic metre, rhythm and rhyme? We seem at least to be re-embracing something of the mystical power of symbolism, metaphor and even allegory. 5. The Proliferation of Multimedia Arts Much more significantly, early Third Millennium poets are more and more likely to explore largely hitherto unknown avenues of expression in poetics, such as multi-media poetry, by incorporating poetry and painting, poetry and photography, poetry and cinema, poetry and musical performance, or any permutation of these art forms. Aren't we aiming at nothing less than the amalgamation of all the Arts forms into one all-inclusive Art medium sometime in this century? Yes, I think we may rest assured that there will soon enough appear on the international Arts scene poets who are simultaneously musicians, photographers, film producers, multi-media artists, or any combination of these metiers. No one nation, neither England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries nor America in the twentieth, will ever again be able to dominate the international tsunami web of multi-lingual poetry now sweeping our planet. More than at any time in the past, so many of our contemporary poets are bilingual, trilingual or multi-lingual, and write their poems in more than one language, often in the same poem! And they accomplish more than just that. Modern poets are also distinctly prone to experimenting with multi-media. This is already abundantly clear from our own multilingual, multinational Anthology, in which we find at least a few of our poet-artists happily experimenting with the merging of diverse art forms. I am referring to such poets as the Canadian artists Bradley Alexander Bucsis and Richard Vallance (photographer/ poets) and Richard W. Stevenson (Canadian haijin and jazz musician); the French-Turkish artist/ poet, Üzeyir Lokman Çayci; the British artist, Diana Velada illustrating the poems of her daughter, Omma Velada; the American photographic artist, Diane Keys (poems without words) and C.S. Scott, poet-musician and composer extraordinaire from California. 6. The rapid spread of haiku, Japanese and Oriental verse forms with the explosive growth of the Internet
Matsuo Basho. Haiku #33 (1687) "Skylark" In the middle of a plain, utterly unconcerned, a skylark sings.
Japanese Skylark "Hibari" Blind skylark © by Pamela H. Murray 2005 Last, but far from least, the proliferation of new poetry genres borrowed from the Orient, above all Japanese haiku, renga, tanka and other similar verse forms, are leaving their own distinctive imprint on Western poetry. Most Japanese and Oriental poetry is notable for its marked simplicity and beauty of expression, the crispness and clarity of its imagery, its self-effaced tone and the pervasive sense of hard won peacefulness it so often embodies. It is notable that these qualities appear to be almost diametrically opposed to the nihilistic world views adopted by all too many poets of the previous century. Nor should we forget for an instant that, like the sonnet, also on the rebound in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the haiku is a strict, formal poetry genre, subject to cardinal "rules" or principles of composition and to the clear need for mastery over delicacy and subtlety in poetic composition on the part of any really serious haijin. So if La Pléiade movement in sixteenth century France exerted a powerful and lasting influence, not only over the poetry of Renaissance France and England, but over all successive eras in the history of Western poetry without exception, perhaps we can nourish the hope in our firmly held conviction that the international, multi-lingual, Internet based New Pleiades poets and other like-minded poets of our age will likewise reach out to inspire the poetry of future generations to fathom exciting new realms of poetical expression as yet unexplored. Who are the Poets Contributing to The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry? While no one among us would dare make the preposterous claim that any of our poets contributing to The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry will necessarily attain the golden or silver orbed greatness of such Renaissance giants as Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and William Shakespeare, or of the stellar Romantic geniuses the likes of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley, we would like to believe, at least for ourselves, that some of our company may just possibly exert some lasting influence, however minor, on whatever future direction(s) world poetry is likely to take in the twenty-first century. At best, we may nourish the hope that the current trend towards a renewal or renascence of "Neo-Romanticism" will persist for a little while at least. Even if it doesn't, and there is another backlash against it similar to that which occurred in the twentieth century against the first wavelet of Neo-Romanticism, we can still lift our heads proudly and proclaim with confidence that we will have had at least some influence, however minor, on the poetry of future generations on the near horizon. Either we are set to be trend-setters for a few generations to come, or we will have stirred a tempest in a teapot. No matter the eventual outcome, we who ride the second wave of "Neo-Romanticism" in the early Third Millennium will have exerted a definite impact on the poets who are shortly to follow in our footsteps.
The Earth in the Milky Way Yet, if we allow ourselves the liberty of viewing all the poems of all the contributors to this anthology synoptically, as a mirror held up to our own day and age, only then may we get a real taste for what is going on in today's poetry scene. Only then will we viscerally experience poetry of the early Third Millennium. © by Richard Vallance 2005 with the editorial assistance of Pamela Murray and Helga Ross, Canada
Complete References & Notes for Vallance Reviews 50 & 52
[1] La Pléiade What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poem? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. A poet, described in *ideal* perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) *fuses*, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (*laxis effertur habenis* [it is carried onwards with loose reins]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. 'Doubtless,' as Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately to the poetic IMAGINATION) [Italics mine] [9] The entire Introduction to The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry has been republished in two parts in Vallance Review 50, October 2005 and Vallance Review 52, December 2005 in Poetry Life & Times (UK) [10] "Psychology and Literature" in CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, © 1966, pg. 161. [11] By the time this review is online in the December 2005 issue of Poetry Life & Times, The New Pleiades Anthology will have been released in Canada. The anthology will be released in the United States soon. Here is the complete bibliographic record for The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry = Le Florilège de la nouvelle Pléiade, as published in Canada: Vallance, Richard, Editor-in-Chief & Bucsis, Bradley Alexander, Book Layout Editor. The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry = Le Florilège de la nouvelle Pléiade. Ottawa, Ontario: Describe Adonis Press, © 2005. ISBN 0-9737888-6-0 [National Library of Canada] CD-ROM multimedia anthology. $15.95
Richard Vallance is the author of: Canadian Federation of Poets: Poetry Lessons: Lesson & Exercise - Week 18 SONNETS in The Canadian Federation of Poets weekly Poetry Progress Lessons & Exercises series
SONNETTO POESIA is published quarterly in print & is advertised on the front page of the current issue of Poetry Life and Times. To subscribe to SONNETTO POESIA, contact the editor, Richard Vallance. To read the earlier e-zine back issues, visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here: 
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