Very recently, I hosted a live online poetry event for New York’s The Society of Classical Poets (SCP). I introduced six American poets, of whom two were naturalized Americans, one originally from Russia and the other from England. In introducing them and their excellent work, I attempted to say a little about “classical” poetry in general, since I felt that this was a largely misunderstood concept, and therefore, I needed to provide some context and perspective on it.
In other words, I had to correct the notion that classical poetry was, at its simplest, only poetry that rhymed; or, at its more sophisticated, that it was poetry about a tribe of remote historical people, dead for thousands of years; or that even—God forbid—it was poetry that focused on gods and goddesses from pagan worlds that we no longer believed in. Put more simply still: that classical poetry was completely irrelevant to the contemporary world, that rhyming was artificial and superficial, that no one cared about the long-distant dead, and that science meant that talking about gods and goddesses was just childish bibble-babble.
