Modernism and the Loss of Form

A reflection on rupture, clarity, and why the line still matters.

We’re told that modernism liberated poetry—freed it from meter, rhyme, and the tyranny of tradition. But I don’t see freedom in the wreckage. I see something else: disconnection. Fragmentation. The rise of cleverness without clarity. Image without anchor. Emotion without architecture.

In the early 20th century, it may have been necessary to rupture the past. But the rupture never healed—it simply emptied the room of direction. And now we live in its echo, where poets write line breaks and call them truth.

Modernism gave us visionaries. But it also gave us a tradition of formlessness posing as depth, and we’ve never truly returned to the thread that form once held.

I don’t mourn the past. But I don’t bow to it either. I use form not to go backward—but to go inward. Toward coherence. Toward craft. Toward something worth re-reading.

If that’s not modern, so be it.