My Favorite Modern Poet
"Modern poetry" suggests to many people innovations in technique--free verse instead of sonnets, unconventional capitalization, and the like. If I thought such innovations actually resulted in writing better poems, perhaps I would agree—but I don't and don't. To me, the interesting feature of modern poetry is content, not form.
Consider, for an example, Hymn to Breaking Strain, which takes as its central image the table of breaking strains in the back of an engineering handbook, a table which tells "what traffic wrecks macadam, what concrete should endure" but does not provide the equivalent information for human beings who, like materials, are sometimes subject to strains "too merciless to bear." That poem could not have been written very far into the past because no such tables existed then.
Or consider The Secret of the Machines and The Miracles. The central point of each poem is how miraculous the world of modern technology is, a point made by describing it in a poet's language.
...
You will find the Mauretania at the quay,
Till her captain turns the lever ‘neath his hand,
And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea.
...
I sent a message to my dear --
A thousand leagues and more to Her --
The dumb sea-levels thrilled to hear,
And Lost Atlantis bore to Her.
Behind my message hard I came,
And nigh had found a grave for me;
But that I launched of steel and flame
Did war against the wave for me.
Which may help to explain why my favorite modern poet is Rudyard Kipling.
To be fair, e.e. cummings, more conventionally thought of as modern for his stylistic quirks, has some modern content as well:
"Lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself"
or the poem that uses driving a new car as a metaphor for making love to a virgin.
But Kipling is better.