A New Romanticism offers an alternative to the currently dominant postmodernist perspective. Postmodernist’s poets often wonder if poetry is dead. A New Romanticism says that poetry is alive and well; it’s postmodernism that is dead--worse!--postmodernism was a stillborn. Postmodernism was and is a stillborn because since its inception it refuses to accept the true nature of human existence, that is, our spiritual nature. Spirituality embarrasses postmodernism. They consider the topic part of the old Christian superstition that they’ve worked hard to be rid of so they could offer the modern world a poetry that was free from all that superstitious nonsense. A New Romanticism is spiritual; not religious. As a spiritual perspective A New Romanticism draws on a fully developed spirituality that helps allow poetry to reveal the life that it has always enjoyed despite the prognostications of postmodernists and postmodernism.

A New Romanticism also wants to take poetry out of the hands of the academics and return poetry to the people where it belongs. Returning poetry to the people will create a vast improvement to the quality of modern poetry while preparing the ground for future poets to create the body of work that will represent an inevitable renaissance in the art of poetry. That renaissance will never come with postmodernists choking poetry to death with all their useless proscriptions. This is a time when poetry must break free from all those restrictions and begin the labors that are required of it now and in the future.

Andrew Chavez is currently living in Manhattan, Kansas. He received his B.A. in sociology from Kansas Wesleyan University and did graduate work in sociology at The American University in Washington D.C. and Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. His M.A. in English is from Kansas State University.

Even still there’s room for songs
To bring light among the darkness.

Let noxious rivers flow between eroded banks
And oceans fill with spilled pollution.
Even still these songs can sing.

Give to the air no breathing room
So flowers bloom choking.
Even still songs can sing.

Spread farther, wider, deeper, louder,
Higher, and more frantic and fantastic
The influence of man
Until we can’t see our image without a grimace,
But songs are still singing.

Up from the soil comes the tunes
Rooted in our various problems and paradoxes;
Flowering, full bloom, into resolutions
Delighting the eye and our other senses.

Up then, singers, awaken and sound the alarm.
Our need is great so let our songs
Spread wide upon the fields
And travel the vast territories over the oceans.

And yet will any song do?
Will any rime set itself to curative resonations?

Heavy world, diabolical.
Great reservoir of griefs and woes,
Worries and fears, that can and do
Shock the mind, stun it,
Sending us all scurrying away, fleeing;
Dashing hopes, crushing dreams,
Finding us all in our own way cringing.

But I bethink our condition again thinking
How greater powers are at work here
Than that monster multitude of competitive greedy strivings
That clog the veins of our body proper.
Bright star in the heavens!
Ineffable rumblings stirring below!
Gentle stream singing a joyful water song
From the banks of our own bodies;
Pouring life giving moisture
Into the vessels of our resourcefulness and creativity.
Let’s drink; let’s bathe in this common pool
Bubbling up here among us.

Despite our many mistakes.
Despite our ignorance.
Despite the fear, anxiety, doubt, and confusion
Making many people think the whole thing impossible.

Can anything be done?
Are we allowed to do it?
Is it safe to try ourselves with these problems?
Will there be any rewards for the effort?

Then despite our answers.
Despite the questions.
Despite what is or might be or can be
Or should be or could be.
Despite it all songs remain
The field for our resolutions.