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One of the most influential of the modern poets was Ezra Pound (1885-1972). He wrote the following short poem which seems to be expressing an acceptance by many contemporary poets--but not all, by any means--of Whitman's radical example.
A PACT
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
Following Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and others, many contemporary poets have totally abandoned rhyme and meter, traditional forms such as odes and sonnets, and many have abendoned "poetic diction," including reliance on similes, metaphors, and other imagery. The short poem by Ezra Pound quoted above is an example. There are no rhymes and no detectable meter. There is one image, which is probably what distinguishes it as a poem:
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
It seems highly significant that Ezra Pound, who had such a strong influence on modern poets in America and Great Britain, would look to Whitman as his "father" and acknowledge that it was Whitman who "broke the new wood"--meaning, I suppose, that it was Whitman who figuratively chopped down the tree and made the wood accessible to his thousands of literary descendants. It was a huge achievement for Walt Whitman to demolish poetic conventions which had been slavishly followed ever since the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. It has had a liberating influence on poets and poetry--although it has to be acknowledged that it might have been responsible for the creation of a considerable amount of bad poetry at the same time.
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