My reply had been in response to @DrDeth mentioning Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature as evidence that song lyrics are poetry; I was simply noting that many in the literature and poetry communities were critical of that award, because they did not consider lyrics as something which should qualify for an award in “literature.”
I was trying to be careful to not state an agreement nor disagreement with that stance in my post; FWIW, I didn’t (and don’t) have a particular POV, though I do feel that Dylan’s work is certainly “poetic.” But, that said, the OP here clearly stated, in post #3, that they aren’t looking for examples of musical lyrics to answer their question, and half of the posts in this thread are actively fighting against that.
The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.
There’s plenty of great poetry out there, but not much of it makes a huge impact on the cultural zeitgeist. My pick would be Wyn Cooper’s 1987 poem “Fun,” which became Sheryl Crow’s first monster hit song, “All I Wanna Do.” It survived pretty well in its original form as well.
If so, I think there’s been greater anglophonic influence by a set of poems that begin
Oompa loompa
doompadeedoo
There’s another unexplored category of modern poetry: the advertisement. I’m having trouble thinking of one with Star Wars-level influence, but on a lesser level, those Old Spice ads might qualify.
Howl, The Road Not Taken and Desiderata – all mentioned already – are among my candidates for Runner-Up, but if song lyrics and speeches are ruled out, the Serenity Prayer is the obvious winner. It was written by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932, though may not have taken its final form (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”) until the 1940’s.
M.L. King’s “I have a dream” speech (or an excerpt therefrom) is more recent. But even more recent are Bob Dylan’s lyrics. But which song? It doesn’t have the most beautiful lyrics, but for cultural significance: The Times They Are A-Changin’.
W.H. Auden ‘Funeral Blues’ - (‘stop all the clocks …’), used to great effect in Four Weddings and a Funeral, had its moment in the spotlight sixty years after its initial release.
Despite that, I think the last time poetry really mattered by saying something that couldn’t be said otherwise was during and immediately after the Great War, with poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others articulating the short and ugly journey from aspirant manhood to crippling loss. Not really my field but in the inter-war period people did recognise that the war poets were articulating grief and horror that was indescribable to those without direct experience.
If we’re doing song lyrics, I’m gonna throw “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five into the mix as it had a pretty big impact culturally as well as musically, and still gets cited (included a nod to it in Hamilton).
I vote for “The Rape Joke” from 2013, by Patricia Lockwood.
Caused a flurry of commentary on the internet when it was first published. Might be the first viral poem. You don’t hear about it as much, but if I ever mention it, it seems that most people who were older than 25 in 2013 have heard of it.
As well as the reasons I give above another reason not to include song lyrics is the question just becomes “when was the last really culturally influential song” which is a whole different question (not a totally trivial one TBH but not the one I’m asking)
We’re back to “what is a poem”? The modernists tossed out stanzas and rhyme schemes and rhymes themselves to the fury and consternation of their predecessors. Robert Frost said “writing free verse is like playing hand ball with no wall, or like playing tennis without a net” or at least one of the papers covering his February 1933 talk said he did. (Another paper has it slightly differently.) Is free verse poetry? Is every series of one-sentence paragraphs poetry? Gil Scott-Heron’s works are one-sentence paragraphs. In “Winter in America” he self-references the work as a “story” and as a “song.” If a writer eliminates the paragraph breaks the piece is classified as “prose poetry.” Can such a hybrid exist? Modernist T. S. Eliot didn’t think so. He lost just as Frost did. The first section of “Howl” is a single 2000+ word sentence, broken up by commas to make paragraphs. How is that to be categorized?
Lockwood is perhaps another hybrid. She got a review in the May 29, 2014 New Yorker.
Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry. Even the exception, her most famous poem, “Rape Joke,” could read as a series of exceptional tweets.
Yes, the writer calls “Rape Joke” a poem. Did it become a poem because it was written by a poet? The one-sentence paragraph form in everywhere in postmodern writing. McSweeney’s runs them often. Humor writers depend on it. Stand-up routines can be broken down that way. Trillin’s controversial doggerel (post #51) is a series of rhymed couplets, but otherwise it could be written as one-sentence paragraphs with the same punch. Is everything that rhymes a poem?
“I know poetry when I see it” is no more true than “I know pornography when I see it.” As a reader and writer, that’s fine with me. I like words, not categories. Nevertheless, the fuzzy bounds of poetry do make threads like this more difficult.
Personally, my definition is that poetry is writing that conforms to some other structure in addition to what’s required by the meaning. A rhyme scheme is one such possible structure. So is a meter. So is an extended body of text that avoids ever using the letter “e”. So is something structured by how the words appear on the page. There are a lot of options. But there has to be some sort of additional structure.
Poet Laureate John Betjeman was very active in the heritage architecture preservation movement, and despised the suburban destruction of the environment. His poem Slough is well-known in this country, a polemic against developers and capitalists in general.
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now
Betjeman saved many important buildings in the UK, which to me makes his work unusually significant on a cultural level.
