.

Report on Results of the SCP Survey of Poets

by Roy E. Peterson and Evan Mantyk

The survey had 60 respondents, about 1/3rd of them were SCP Members. Respondents were asked to rate the importance of basic poetry elements. This was their rating:

.

Meter Importance: 93% ranked this as important (23.3%) or very important (70%)

Rhyme Importance: 95% ranked this as important (43.3%) or very important (51.7%)

Message Importance: 93% ranked this as important (25%) or very important (68.3%)

.

For the favorite rhyme scheme, there were a wide variety of answers and no clear preference overall. The most common selected was abab, followed by couplets, aa bb.

When asked “What are your top three categories for poems you prefer to read?” Respondents most preferred “Humor/Satire” and “Stories,” which tied at 43.3%. This was followed by “Spiritual/Religious” at 41.7%, and “Imaginative/Fantasy” at 30%. At the other end, “Holiday-themed” received zero votes and “Children’s” received only one vote.

Asked about whether they have written in blank verse, 65% of respondents said they had. Asked if the Society of Classical Poets should publish blank verse, 48.3% said Yes, 25% said No, and 26.7% had No Preference.

Asked if more poetry challenges are needed, 62.1% of respondents said yes.  48.3% said six or more a year and 13.8% said less than six a year.

Our preferred font question elicited a variety of responses with the largest number of votes (12) going to  Times New Roman.

On the question of having used Artificial Intelligence (AI) in writing a poem, 93.3% answered No, while 6.7% answered Yes.

Questions about favorite living and past poets were highly varied with no single poet ever receiving more than five votes.

When asked, “When writing poetry, do you feel that an actual Muse of some sort is involved?” 44.1% answered Yes and 35.6% answered No.

We were pleased with so many comments of praise at the bottom of the form. We are also taking into consideration the constructive feedback given. We always seek to improve the SCP.

Thank you!

.

.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.

 

***Read Our Comments Policy Here***

 

13 Responses

  1. James Sale

    Thanks for doing this work Roy and Evan – the sample is small so not especially indicative quantitatively; though I am sure the qualitative comments were much more interesting. Naturally, I am disappointed that I didn’t rank as anyone’s favourite poet! And more seriously, slightly disturbed that rhyming ranked as negligibly more important than meter, especially as less than 50% (given, on a small sample) thought publishing blank verse a good idea. Such a result – I am afraid to say – indicates a number of people who know little about poetry, but clearly prefer Hallmark. Hard, perhaps – but as the critic I A Richards correctly observed: “Meter for the most difficult and most delicate utterances is the all but inevitable means” – not rhyme. And as for blank verse, the mere fact of the existences of Shakespeare and Milton meant that we should all be welcoming blank verse! Fortunately, whilst polls are useful, poetry is not actually a democracy: put another way, by the poet GM Hopkins: “It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither”. Keep up the great work.

    Reply
  2. Brian Yapko

    Evan and Roy, thank you for taking the time and effort to conduct this survey. I am fully aligned with James’ comment above: “And as for blank verse, the mere fact of the existences of Shakespeare and Milton meant that we should all be welcoming blank verse!”

    I cannot help but note a very small poll sampling. And I also cannot help but question the extent to which readers are actually acquainted with the history and breadth of English verse. As I said to Roy in a recent comment (some of which I will cut-and-paste here) the vast majority of classical poetry has been written WITHOUT rhyme and NOT with. I have seen statistics that up to 75% of English poetry is comprised of blank verse and not the other way around. https://poemanalysis.com/best-poems/blank-verse/
    \
    Carving blank verse out of classical poetry would be like carving the symphony out of classical music. You could do it, but the result would be both ahistorical and impoverishing

    Here is my short list of blank verse pieces that I would never consider in any way inferior to rhyming poetry:

    “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats is in blank verse.
    So is William Wordsworth’s “Prelude” and his “Tintern Abbey.”
    So is Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” and his famous translation of Dante’s “Inferno.”
    So is John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
    And Christopher Marlowe’s “Faust”
    And John Dryden’s “All for Love”
    And every one of Shakespeare’s plays
    And “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s” by Robert Browning
    And “Fra Lippo Lippi” by Browning
    And “The Mending Wall” by Robert Frost
    And “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot
    And “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
    And “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    And “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
    “Alastor” by Percy Shelley
    “To Spring” by William Blake
    “Manfred” and “Darkness” by Lord Byron
    “Hyperion” and “This Living Hand” by John Keats

    This is a very cursory list. There are hundreds of additional examples. The list of immortal poems in English blank verse goes on and on. Non-rhyming English poetry goes all the way back to Beowulf. Rhyming poetry is a subset of Classical Poetry and — if you include the ancient classics in Greek and Latin (not to mention the Hebrew Psalms) where rhyme is nonexistent — it is probably the minority. This position is even further bolstered by our own haiku contest in which rhyme is irrelevant.

    Reply
  3. Joseph S. Salemi

    A sample of 60 readers out of a worldwide audience that is probably numbered in the thousands is statistically insignificant.

    Rhyme is a wonderful poetic tool and none of us would want to do without it. But rhyme is a latecomer to English verse-making. It did not exist in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Its presence in English and other Germanic poetry came about purely as an ad hoc response to the collapse of inflectional endings and the strong caesura in the four-beat alliterative line. Rhyme was borrowed from the Romance languages, as a way to indicate line closure to listeners, which is what exactly happened in the Romance languages after the inflections of Latin had died out.

    As Brian has pointed out, blank verse constitutes a very large percentage of canonical English poetry. Trying to get rid of it would be like demanding that all drawings that aren’t done in color should be banished from our galleries.

    When we ask whether the SCP should publish blank verse (and when a small number of people who constitute 25% of an insignificant sampling say that the SCP should not) we only embarrass ourselves in public. This gives our enemies a big weapon against us — they can claim that we are a site for ignoramuses, philistines, and boors.

    Reply
  4. Roy Eugene Peterson

    FYI: Blank Verse and Milton.
    Cambridge University Press
    9781107025400 – The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens – Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity – By Henry Weinfield
    Excerpt
    Introduction: Blank-verse freethinking and its opponents
    In the “Note on the Verse” that he attached to Paradise Lost, Milton asks that his blank verse be “esteem’d [as] an example set, the first in English, of ancient Liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern Bondage of Riming.”1 Milton derived his blank verse not only from English models but also from the versi sciolti, the “freed” hendecasyllabic verse of Italian poetry. https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/25400/excerpt/9781107025400_excerpt.htm

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      So what are you suggesting? That blank verse is somehow conducive to free thought?

      Blank verse — like a pistol — is merely a tool. It can be used for good purposes or bad ones. And the very same thing can be said about rhyme.

      Reply
      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        No, I am not suggesting that it is conducive to free thought. I agree that it is a tool for some, just not me.

  5. The Society

    I have no intention of banning blank verse, although I can see why it might look that way based on the question. Rather, the question that has alarmed people was only meant to gauge people’s opinions about blank verse. In a world where most newly published works are unrhymed free verse, the distinction that rhyme (however sparse) and alliteration offer may seem more compelling than only meter, which I would venture to say, on its own, is lost on most readers of poetry today. Blank verse may be viewed as in a liminal space. What I think Roy is getting at is do people, probably not those commenting here, really value this liminal space in terms of new creation or is it as marginal as he suspects. That was my reading anyway, Roy. Feel free to correct me.

    —Evan, SCP Editor

    Reply
    • Roy Eugene Peterson

      Amen, Evan. I was just framing the discussion with Milton’s Note he felt was necessary more than 400 years ago to explain his writing to the English public as a departure from the norm. Let’s be clear, SCP accepts well metered and well written blank verse. I even plan to join the Haiku contest, since Haiku is Haiku.

      Reply
      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        By the way, our Survey may be groundbreaking. The only other related surveys I found on the Internet were about whether or not the public reads poetry. The numbers have increased over the past few years from around 6% to around 13% from the ones I found.

  6. Brian Yapko

    For those of us who love to read and write blank verse, Evan and Roy, that’s very good to hear. Thank you for clarifying this.

    Reply
  7. James A. Tweedie

    In support of Milton et al, I shall be submitting another blank verse poem forthwith!

    Reply
  8. Joseph S. Salemi

    Milton’s use of blank verse was not a novelty that he had to defend to readers. His argument was that he was RETURNING to ancient practice in epics (such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Rape of Proserpine, and the Pharsalia) where unrhymed metrical lines were the pattern of composition. Rhyme was always the newcomer. Unrhymed metrical verse was always the original practice.

    Reply
  9. Russel Winick

    Thank you to Evan and Roy for all of your work, and to all who posted comments here. Very interesting and educational – exactly what makes SCP so valuable!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.