For several centuries, numerous movements (aka fashions) in poetry have emerged, reigned for a while and waned: Mannerism; Classicism; Romanticism; Symbolism; Modernism; Futurism; Acmeism; Imaginism; Objectivism; Surrealism; Minimalism; New Formalism; etc. This is just a randomly selected sample from a list that seems endless, but they have all had one important feature in common: they were (or are currently) restrictive of form, and often also of content. They have each prescribed their own version of what constitutes legitimate poetry, engendering conformity expected to override the individual artistic judgement of the participants. Of course it can be argued that those who embrace an '-ism' have already voluntarily relinquished their individual judgement, preferring instead to 'go with the flow'. And it might unkindly be further thought that this is an indication of paucity of talent. But this is unfair – it ignores the reality that, in the face of a prevalent '-ism', those who don't conform get preferentially excluded from the mechanisms that ensure the public emergence and preservation of their work.

In some cultures, politics have dictated (or still do dictate) conformity to some prescribed norm by statute or official censorship. But even in the absence of such official coercion there's an insidious trap for the unwary. Because writing is commonly done in isolation, there's a strong temptation to seek out potentially interested fellow spirits with whom to share one's ideas. But, precisely because authorship is largely a solitary venture, such fellow spirits are in the first instance readily identifiable only via their membership of some publicly visible group. So one joins the group. But here's the catch – unless one's work corresponds to the group's norms one is swiftly left out in the cold,1 so because we're social animals it's tempting to adopt those norms. Quite soon, for anyone who maintains membership of such a group, having necessarily become subject to its norms, cognitive dissonance cuts in resulting in acceptance that their previous aesthetic standards were erroneous – and thus a 'movement' is progressively strengthened.

The names ascribed to movements may come later, but the conformity is there from the start, resulting in deluges of almost indistinguishable 'poetry in quotes' that typically doesn't outlast its creators. The volume of poetry we now have from past movements is a tiny proportion of the original output, and we can probably be grateful for that. What has survived is mostly what has continued to appeal to successive generations of readers in the intervening years, plus of course a moderate amount of works defined by 'experts' as Great Art independent of whether anyone wants to read it voluntarily. The latter is primarily imposed by educators on school kids and undergraduates in English Lit. and is the stuff that gets ruthlessly parodied by small boys, as in:

Lars Porsena of Closium

By the Nine Gods he swore

And when he saw Horatius

He swore by several more.2

 or the numerous and increasingly vulgar variants of 'The boy stood on the burning deck'.3

The big problem we currently face is that, as time has not yet blunted the lion's paws and due to the speed and penetration of modern mass communication, we have in front of us the entire unfiltered output of the present age and all its movements. Inevitably a lot of it's drivel. So finding good poetry to use as a model (or indeed just to read) is a hard task. But among the mass of the conventional and derivative we will occasionally encounter a poem that's individually sublime, so the effort of ploughing through that mass is probably still worth it. What usually first signals a poem's excellence is that it's not like all the rest – it doesn't necessarily subscribe to any specific movement, but is shaped individually to present its argument to best advantage (and of course that it actually has a significant argument in the first place). If one has the good luck to identify the poet and examine their output, one will find that their style, techniques and content are likely to be supremely inconsistent, being optimally tuned to each poem's unique intent. That's the key indicator of the real thing, and it's crucial to us as poets to learn to recognise it – and, ultimately, to emulate it.

 [1] Such exclusion is not necessarily intentional. I remember joining a London group in my youth, only to find that, while other participants' poems attracted comment and applause, mine, which were significantly different, elicited silence, failing to register with the audience.

 [2] originally by Thomas Babington Macaulay 1852

 [3] by Felicia Hemans 1826