I have to put this up because it interests me and going more into it can help me in my appreciation of poetry!
First, I have a nice volume of the poems of Catullus. I read many of the poems but will of course have to revisit them. I did read in my volume about how Catullus gave new life to poetry (through the personal poem and more) and here thanks to mwh for giving me the word ‘neoteric’ from another thread on Catullus. Incidentally, I just visited Wikipedia and found a page devoted to that term and it does touch on what I want to post here.
I just want to note that American poets brought in the ‘make it new’ principle themselves in the early 20th century. William Carlos Williams celebrated make it new in 'Spring and All (1923). Ezra Pound was a big proponent of make it new as well. I guess ‘make it new’ was a reaction to some of the least appealing features of Victorian literature. Must note though that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, mid 19th century, were already precursors of the ‘make it new’ principle. So there is quite a hash of poets involved. Williams also had little time for TS Eliot but that must be another story!
On to the present; the ‘make it new’ principle survives, thanks to, say, Frank O’Hara (personal poems) and others. Two very contemporary poets, Eileen Myles and Bernadette Mayer (d. 2022) speak of Catullus in their poems. Mayer went so far as to pen her own ‘raunchy’ poems in the style of Catullus. So I wonder if there is some irony involved in the American insistence on making it new. I also want to go back to Mayer’s poems and see just how much she makes the style of Catullus her own. The poems of Myles can be quite raunchy too and always exceedingly personal. Very dicey territory, in my view.
But all is not lost, even if there is some irony in how the moderns re-use Catullus. The idea of the personal in the colloquial sense informs poems today. But of course there is so much more to consider in terms of what makes a poem a poem.
I wanted to put this out because it is kind of exciting to me, to consider how the personal can inform poems today. I am as much a ‘commoner’ in American poetry as in classical literature. All for the enjoyment. I hope this is not too much of a digression. I also wonder what other ages took up the mantra of ‘Make it new.’ I am pretty sure there are a few others.