Introduction: The Contemporary Turn in Modern Poetics

The category of modern poetry, far from a monolithic or historically bounded construct, encompasses a constellation of formal experiments, cognitive innovations, and cultural negotiations that have unfolded from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Its boundaries are not fixed by a single aesthetic doctrine, but rather are continuously renegotiated through the interplay of poetic practice, critical theory, and technological transformation. For the purposes of this volume, we define modern poetry as a broad, evolving field that includes three overlapping but distinct historical phases: the high modernist period (c. 1890–1945), the postmodern experimental phase (c. 1945–1990), and the contemporary cross-media, digital, and decolonial phase (c. 1990–present). This definition deliberately moves beyond the narrow connotation of “modernist poetry” as a discrete historical movement tied to figures such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, to encompass the full range of formal innovation that has shaped poetic production in the modern and contemporary eras. The opening salvo of this field is conventionally dated to Charles Baudelaire’s *Les Fleurs du mal* (1857), a collection that rejected the Romantic emphasis on individualized emotional expression and idealized nature, instead centering the fleeting, sensory-laden experience of urban modernity. Baudelaire’s signature concept of “modernity” as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” established a core thematic and formal orientation for subsequent poetic experiments: the turn away from universalizing, timeless themes toward the documentation of fragmented, rapidly changing contemporary experience, rendered through precise, condensed imagery rather than expansive narrative exposition.

The formal innovations pioneered by Baudelaire were systematized and radicalized by the Imagist movement of the early twentieth century, a loose collective of poets including Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Richard Aldington who issued their foundational manifesto in 1912, calling for “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective,” “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,” and “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.”¹ The Imagist rejection of Romantic redundancy and Victorian moralizing established a formal paradigm that prioritized concision, sensory precision, and the autonomy of the poetic image, a paradigm that would be expanded and contested by subsequent movements from high modernism to the present. The 1922 publication of Eliot’s *The Waste Land* marked a turning point in the field, as Eliot integrated Imagist concision with a fragmented, multi-voiced, culturally allusive mode of composition that mirrored the disorienting experience of post-World War I Western society. Eliot’s concept of the “objective correlative” – the idea that a specific set of objects, images, or situations can evoke a particular emotion in the reader without explicit authorial exposition – became a foundational principle of modern poetic form, shifting the focus of poetic meaning from authorial intent to the reader’s cognitive response to textual imagery.

The postwar period saw the emergence of postmodern experimental poetry that explicitly rejected the high modernist emphasis on formal coherence and cultural authority. The Confessional poetry movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, broke from modernist objectivity to center personal trauma, mental illness, and gender politics, using fragmented, emotionally raw imagery and irregular, speech-based rhythm to convey the instability of individual experience. The Language poetry movement of the 1970s and 1980s, including figures such as Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian, pushed this rejection of coherence further, deconstructing the stability of language itself to expose the ideological assumptions embedded in everyday speech. Language poets abandoned traditional notions of imagery as a transparent window to meaning, instead treating language as a material, self-referential system whose signifiers could be rearranged, fragmented, and destabilized to undermine dominant narratives of coherence and meaning. By the 1990s, a new wave of contemporary experimental poetry emerged that expanded the boundaries of poetic form beyond the written text to incorporate visual art, digital media, sound, and ecological systems. Poets such as Anne Carson, whose *Nox* (2010) combines handwritten marginalia, translated Latin text, and photographic inserts to memorialize her late brother, and digital poets such as Christopher Knowles, whose algorithmically generated poetry challenges conventional notions of authorial intentionality, exemplify this turn toward cross-media and posthuman forms of poetic production.

The theoretical evolution of modern poetics has tracked these shifts in poetic practice, moving from early twentieth-century formalist and New Critical approaches that prioritized close reading of textual form, to mid-century structuralist and post-structuralist approaches that deconstructed the stability of textual meaning, to the contemporary turn toward cognitive poetics, media theory, and new formalism that re-centers the relationship between poetic form, reader cognition, and technological and ecological context. Early formalist theory, particularly the Russian Formalist movement of the 1910s and 1920s, established the foundational premise that poetic form is not a mere vessel for thematic content, but a productive force that shapes the reader’s perception of reality. Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” (*ostranenie*) argued that the purpose of art is to disrupt the automatic, habituated ways in which we perceive the world, restoring our ability to experience the world as new and vivid: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”² Applied to poetry, defamiliarization explains why modernist poets abandoned traditional meter and rhyme: the disruption of familiar formal patterns forces readers to slow down their reading, attend to the materiality of language, and reconstruct meaning through active cognitive engagement, rather than relying on automatic, habituated responses to conventional poetic forms.

New Criticism, which dominated Anglo-American literary studies from the 1930s to the 1960s, built on formalist premises to develop a systematic method of close reading that prioritized the internal coherence of the poetic text over external context such as authorial biography or historical background. Cleanth Brooks’s concept of the “well-wrought urn” framed the poem as a self-contained, organic whole whose meaning could be derived from the interplay of its internal formal elements: imagery, rhythm, metaphor, and tension. The New Critical emphasis on close reading remains a foundational skill for advanced poetry study, but its rejection of external context has been widely critiqued by subsequent theoretical movements for ignoring the social, political, and cultural forces that shape both poetic production and interpretation. Structuralist poetics of the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes, shifted the focus of analysis from the individual text to the underlying structural systems that govern poetic language, treating poems as instances of broader linguistic and cultural codes. Barthes’s famous 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” argued that authorial intention is irrelevant to textual interpretation, as meaning is generated by the interaction between the text’s structural codes and the reader’s cultural knowledge, a premise that opened the door for post-structuralist de