Northrop Frye said that “no poet sits down with a pencil and some blank paper and eventually produces a new poem in a special act of creation ex nihilo.” That is, no poet produces a poem completely independent of poetic tradition. In poetry, modernists aimed to “make it new,” to artfully express the modern world in appropriately new ways. But from what we’ve learned through our class readings, we know many modernists also attested to the necessity of tradition in poetry and an understanding of the poetic works that predate the poet. Eliot and Pound, two of modern poetry’s key orchestrators, for example, often looked to the past for inspiration in their work—Eliot’s odd extended metaphors emulate the verse of the metaphysical poets while Pound’s quatrains counter the perceived coherency of modern free verse.
What I’d like to do for my final project, then, is to create a collection of imitations of modernist poems that deal with themes of originality and the novelty of modernism. I’ll then take a deeper look into these original poems and trace the traditions they borrow from and mimic.
As of now, I’m thinking of using Flipsnack to organize my imitations and a Prezi to organize my research, or just write typical research-paper in conjunction with a Flipsnack book.