Considering what poetry is, and what it means to enjoy poetry, I find myself in the wrong century. At some point - I'm not sure when - poetry stopped including banal concepts like rhyme and meter. This is another way of saying that poetry has, for decades now, been struggling along without integrity. Let me explain. Integrity means wholeness. When a building is well built according to a plan, we say it has integrity. When a person's actions match their beliefs and values, we say they have integrity (especially if their values are high and admirable.) Both instances require conformity to a pattern for the sake of structure and consistency. At some point (I'm not sure exactly when, but I suspect it may involve Walt Whitman somehow) poets began to utterly disregard structure. There was no pattern to make their words conform to. This was and is seen, I believe, as progress. Why? Because it allows ideas and words to be completely unrestrained. And this lack of restraint is a very modern romance. We are in love with the idea of living without boundaries. More precisely, we think we love the idea of living without boundaries, but as a philosophy that ideal is so impossible that we cannot conceive of it on any level. Every cell in your body will die unless it maintains its boundaries. Your skin provides a safe haven for your organs. Every law exists to keep people out of someone else's boundaries. You lock the doors of your home at night because you cannot live without the protection of boundaries. All of life and all of creation displays the absurdity of unrestrained impulses and the impossibility of living without borders.

Only in the realms of ethics and the imagination do we crudely believe we have eradicated the need for fences and walls. This is reflected in modern poems which disdain order so that the mind may roam free, and the result is like watching a drunken giraffe try to run hurdles. It may seem deep and intellectual to try and plumb the depths of such poems, but it is rarely worth the effort. Allow me to site one example. The following poem is one which won a national award for student poetry while I was in high school. See if you can relate to the subject, or fathom the deeper meaning here:

As we were laying in bed
us was murdered.

I cannot remember who wrote this poem, but if I could speak to that person I would tell them that the only thing murdered in this verse is the English language. I obviously cannot comment on every single modern poem, but every time I read one which follows this sort of thinking I am struck by the same inevitable thought: modern poetry has exchanged integrity for lack of content.

One of the advantages of writing in a disciplined manner is that it forces us to think in a disciplined way. Anybody who has achieved anything substantial can testify that discipline is mandatory for success, and no discipline is possible until our thoughts are disciplined. My great fear is that we no longer write poetry in an orderly way because we no longer think in an orderly way.

The lynch-pin for getting moderns to understand the necessity of integrity in this arena may actually be music. Music is a field which requires stringent discipline, and the form of the words must match requirements created by the order of the composition. Every student who groans under the weight of a long poem is ecstatic over the release of a new song by their favorite artist. The only difference is that the proximity of music makes the comprehension of the lyrics either easier, or non-essential. It is amazing how many people today don't stop to think about what the lyrics of a song actually mean!

One of my favorite songs illustrates how music may help to lead modern minds into an affinity for real poetry. One of the verses goes like this:

I heard there was a secret chord
David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It went like this; the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall - the major lift
The baffled king composing 'hallelujah'

Unless I am mistaken, there is an obvious and easily identified structure to these words. The fact that they can work apart from any accompaniment is testified by the fact that when this song was recorded, it was really recited more than sung, and the instruments were limited to the chorus with nothing more than soft percussion behind the artist's voice on each verse.

As one very worthy professor recently noted, one reason that modern poetry seems to blather on and on is that there is no structure to force them to stop! Nothing within the poem itself creates a necessity for actually communicating the idea adequately, or in a timely manner. Sure, it takes a little effort to understand well-written poetry, but that is the worst reason of all for avoiding it. As soon as we can't be troubled to think about things which have been written well, we might as well swing wide the gates, for the barbarians have already won. They are no longer approaching the city, they are disappearing over the hill with their plunder, amazed at how easy the sacking of our culture really was.

I am finding that the alarm was sounded in various places and at various times, but nobody was there to hear it.