Embodied in Pound's cry to "make it new" the zeitgeist suddenly demanded a total break with the past to reflect the supposed fracturing of western culture as it tried desperately to destory itself in the first world war. This modernist aesthetic led to marvelous innovations and experiments in all the arts, and its theoricians and practitioners drove western art into a new era of muscular artistic freedom where all conventions existed only to be broken, where a given piece of art's only tie to convention may have been the absolute conformity required to ensure that they broke every traditional rule in order not to conform. However, before going to terribly far into the future we've taken these experiments to their logical extremities, pushed them as far as they can go before the carefully constructed arguments fall to pieces in the face of the argument that no, in fact, something that is that far from the traditional notions of art, literature, poetry, music etc. has now ceased to be art, music, poetry, or literature and has in fact moved on to become something else.
Now, with the exception of a few (okay, more than a few) bizarre experimental attempts we have in general not crossed that line. However, we've pushed literature to the edge of random gibberish in all genres, and it happened disturbingly quickly as E. E. Cummings, James Joyce, Faulkner, and perhaps William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac at the far end demonstrated.
Now, this is not to resort to Ecclesiastes and complain that there is nothing new under the sun. There are poems to be written, stories to be told, films to be made, and pieces to be composed that are worthy artistic endeavors. While it can be argued that these will all be variations on very old themes, that is irrelevant. All of human endeavor is simultaneously variations on very old themes, and entirely new. Just as each individual human being is both a variation on a very old theme and something entirely original. The point where Eliot misses the boat in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is in divorcing greatness from the individual personality. As is often argued in even "more" modern poetic circles the truth is paradoxical: The universal is found most thoroughly in the intensely personal. I feel that all art is much closer to the practices of the actor - creating individually diverse characters by constantly channeling the creation through yourself. You're not creating something entirely divorced from your own experience, from your own instincts, something imposed from the outside by tradition or anything else. Rather, something is created by the pursuit of alternative selves, the creation of a new "you" through the application of the circumstances of the script - the circumstances of the character - to yourself and through the power of the imagination creating for yourself the you who you would be had you been raised, born etc. in the circumstances provided. The very rules dictate the possibility of the most effective original, unstereotyped character.
In our continual pursuit (at least among those who archly determine that they are pursuing "art" as opposed to the rest of us peons who are simply writing what we love, perhaps even, heaven forbid, considering a general audience) of the new, we have abandoned the rules of any given artform except to attempt to find new ways to break them. Pound did indeed say "make it new," and thank goodness for his long fight in pursuit of true art, despite the elitist and intentionally difficult work he and so many of his contemporaries produced. They were determined in part it seemed, to stay just ahead of taste, so that they might always be cutting edge, always be avant garde. Still how new is it in 2009 to write a "sonnet" in which the only thing the poem has in common with the definition of the sonnet form are the letters s, o, n, e, and t? We've been doing this forever. Spinning our wheels for eighty-years. It is time to declare that the emperors no clothes on, and yet even this gesture is empty and meaningless because it reads as another act of rebellion when we've practiced rebellion so long that there's nothing left to rebel against except the principle of rebellion itself.
When the call for making it new was sounded most recently, nearly 100 years ago, at the beginning of the still continuing modernist period, (granted we've gone through a number of subgenres or variations on the theme of modernism since then, but we've never really divorced ourselves from it entirely, nor evolved into something new from it) it was not the origin of free verse, excuse me verse libre. Whitman had broken that particular barrier, with wonderful success years earlier. New variations on free verse were yet to appear, and wonderful works have been created in the aesthetic that has persisted since that time. I am not against Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams etc. I love their work, they are vibrant and alive still today. At the same time, this absurd insistance that the only way we can work with old forms is to destroy them must be one aspect of the lack of ambition in American Poetry that Donal Hall cites in his essay "Poetry and Ambition."
Much that Hall says is best used for discussion starters and warnings to avoid extremes, but the McPoem he describes is real. And one of its aspects is the robotic insistence of this rebellion against meter and rhyme. Equating the division between open and closed form poetry to the division between modern and "old" poetry is a false dichotomy. One can write a sonnet following the conventions and still do something new, channeling the constraints of form in much the way that the actor channels the constraints of a script, one might still push their experience, their imagination, their will into those limitations and create something new without destroying the limitations in the process. When we as poets demand an absolute absence of form in order to recreate something new "within" the form, we are "chopping [our own heads off] with golden axes and smiling on the strokes that murder us."
Finally then, a question, if we do what we do in an attempt to ensure originality, in an attempt (subconscious or conscious) to conform to standards set eighty to a hundred and forty-fifty years ago, how modern are we?
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