If one looks closely at the history of the arts for which we have reasonably solid evidence (let's say European arts starting from around 1300 CE) there is for many centuries a consistent pattern of improvement in both the range and the quality of the tools in use. For example, in the case of painting: better and more carefully shaped brushes, a widening range and greater durability of pigments, media and varnishes; in the case of music: more refined instruments capable of improved tuning and octave range, more accurate written notation. When it comes to poetry, the current tool kit would ideally consist of an accumulation of metrical, rhythmic, structural and euphonic techniques drawn from the many traditions that have impinged on our culture during the preceding centuries.

As a general principle, the more extensive the tool kit, the greater the opportunities for individual creativity, because from a very large kit a set of optimum tools can more readily be selected to maximally emphasise a specific message. But around the start of the twentieth century the accumulated tool kits of both painting and poetry (and to a lesser extent and somewhat later, music) were largely thrown away, leaving a naked field for experimentation without any recognised guidelines. An often cited (and reasonably convincing) explanation is a reaction against the cloying sentimentality and repetitiveness of much late nineteenth century mainstream arts – a reaction grounded in an unfortunate confusion between dissatisfying subject matter and the techniques of its execution. Very much a matter of 'throwing out the baby with the bathwater'.

But both nature and culture abhor a vacuum, so enterprising artists developed largely philosophical (and in some places, political) models of artistry from scratch, and the most widely adopted defined replacement tool kits. However, they all broadly had one thing in common – they were essentially negative, based on rejection of the despised past in its entirety, rather than careful selection of its best qualities.1 This fundamentally nihilistic approach has persisted to the present, latterly coupled with a transition from the ideal of Flaubert's L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre tout! 2 to elevation of the artist before all, an extreme example being the German sculptor (I forget his name with some relief) who, when asked in the '80s why he hadn't produced any sculpture for some time, replied 'I don't have to. Now, everything I look at becomes art'.

The implications of all this are not unduly surprising. The current commonly approved tool kit being rather sparsely equipped, the results tend to be rather uncomfortably consistent and therefore repetitive. The primary emphasis on the creator rather than the created tends to production of quantity rather than quality, as communication of significant meaning is a somewhat accidental byproduct of the constant demand to produce.3 This is underlined by the huge number of guidance web sites recommending ways to produce poems when not inspired: i.e. when one hasn't really got anything important to say. So form takes precedence over content, and as the range of acceptable forms is limited, vast volumes of very similar (and probably non-durable) poetry are written. This not entirely a new phenomenon. If we had access to the entire poetic output from any past age (an entire school of poetry), we would probably be thankful with good reason that most of it has been lost to time. But that doesn't really justify the current, apparently intentional, mass-production approach.

What primarily matters here though is the largely forgotten distinction between rhetoric and poetry in the traditional sense of both words. Rhetoric is a fashionable, strictly formal, standardised method of making a persuasive case, whether or not the matter in question has any deep or abiding significance for the practitioner (or indeed for the reader or listener). It traditionally found its place in law courts and parliaments, and persists in classical competitions such as Oxford University's Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize. At any given period, rhetoric's formal methods are tightly prescribed and must not be departed from for the results to be acceptable.

Poetry, in the sense used here, is quite different. It's a way of expressing an idea of importance to the poet (and ideally to others) in a manner that maximally conveys its subtlety and connotations. It's here that a wide range of alternative tools is paramount for perfecting the quality of communication, as the presentation should be chosen carefully to emphasise the subtlety of the specific idea to be conveyed. That of course presupposes that the idea is sufficiently subtle in the first place to be worthy of the effort of finding its optimum expression.

So as poets we have two challenges. The first and most important is to have something to say that's worth saying (and preferably not just to the author), and the second is to express it in the manner most appropriate for conveying it. If we're limited by fashion to a narrow range of either acceptable subjects or acceptable techniques, we can't operate as poets, but must merely as rhetoricians. There's nothing wrong in operating as a rhetorician, but it's a big mistake to misname ourselves as poets when so acting. And it follows that we shouldn't label the results as poetry.

 [1] For example, the creative progress of Aleksandr Blok clearly illustrates transition between the two models, occurring for him in 1918 with the writing of 'dvenadtsat' (The Twelve).

 [2] approximately, 'the artist is nothing, the art, everything'.

 [3] I recently read of a poet who has ostensibly written some 6000 poems while holding down a day job in the US military. Robert Graves probably wrote not more than a thousand in his entire lifetime as a full-time author.