FROM THE moment certain poets recognized that the world outside themselves — the objective world seen — was also a language to learn and write, a new poetics became essential to comprehend and appreciate a new poetry that began to emerge. Language is continually renewed from outside Man in the world seen; no longer would the antique poetics of an Aristotle, who sought to define poetics via Greek tragedy, or the modern French poet, Paul Valery, who saw poetry as a self-sufficient, self-referent world of words, suffice to adequately acknowledge and appreciate the new poetry.

Defining ‘new’
New? Well, that itself is a relative term, meaningful only to the extent of something occurring where it had not occurred before, though, by perhaps already existing somewhere else specific over long periods of time, it could be seen as quite familiar, traditional,  and subsequently old in the context of the world.
What is clear is that the catalyst to the birth of new poetry, in English, which is our concern here, has always been the discovery of another culture’s, another language’s contrasting approach to poetics; and that approach, once learnt, appreciated and applied to one’s inherited language and poetic traditions, results in a new stylistic rendering of experience.
An early accelerative stimulus to this development of new poetics and new poetry has obviously been colonial and imperial expansion. In the Anglo world, the new poetry which emerged, particularly from North America, is the positive flipside of imperialism’s negative methods. Positive, here, is not used literally, but implies what certain poets have devised for themselves from a social experience, which could not foresee results such as these new poetic works display.
Any definition of such poetry as ‘bastard’ cultural products is mere figurative exaggeration, evidence of simplified reactionary monolithic stereotypes being applied, rather than actual consideration, without generalized temptations, of the poetry in question. Whatever changes we attribute to mutual cultures via colonial and imperial expansion, we also have to admit that margin of sheer human intellectual curiosity upon contact with new knowledge.

New influences
For instance, whatever definition of poetics English literature may have developed, based on qualities of temperament and tongue, that were manifested in poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, to Donne, Milton, Shelley, Keats, or Wordworth’s Romantic lyricism met a startlingly radical change in the hands of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two mid-19th Century American poets whose works were in English, but not of England or its influenced temperaments.
We need not repeat the obvious North American difference in nature, landscape, Native Indian culture, African people, and all sorts of immigrants from the world over, which shaped a new cultural expression. Alex de Toqueville, the great American social philosopher of its Independent movement, wrote: “On the whole, the literature of a democracy will never demonstrate the order, regularity, skill and art characteristic of aristocratic literature, formal qualities will be ignored or despised, the style will appear bizarre, incorrect, overburdened, loose… (introducing) energy of thought with great variety and extraordinary fecundity.”
Another outstanding American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, ‘The Poet’, wrote: “America is a poem in our eyes. Its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
And Walt Whitman himself would write in his introduction to his amazing book of verse, ‘Leaves of Grass’: “To give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech….the new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas need a tongue according.”
Whitman’s objective was to be versed in the world; and the America he keenly observed and took note of like never before in his extraordinary open-hearted, open-minded ‘Song of Myself’, the first long poem of ‘Leaves of Grass’, was surprisingly philosophically advanced, morally sincere, and practically precise in descriptive observation. It is here that an indelible turning point occurred in Anglo-poetry, and poetry in general which concerned the Western world and its colonial offshoots. Once such new national identities were allowed to emerge, a new poetics and new poetry followed.