Modern Classical Poetry is poetry written today in the modern world which reflects on the styles and overall messages of classical poetry. This probably means little to most people since it requires both an understanding of what is classical poetry and how it differentiates from modern poetry. So here are two definitions: the simple version, and the highly technical version.
The Simple Version
Classical poetry is an era of poetry which encompasses many of the minor and major artistic movements of European modern history, from the Renaissance Era to the close of the Victorian-Romantic-Realistic Era. The poet who is widely acknowledged as the father of the so called "Classical Era" (so called because it is really a conglomerate of many movements and minor eras) is Sir Henry Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales reflected the beginning of form-oriented poetry. Since that time the themes of poetry have changed constantly but the major structural definition of poetry remained the same, thus this era of poetry is one era. The actual structural entities which made up classical poetry will be presented in the "Resources for Poets" tab at the top of this page.
Modern Classical Poetry is simply another minor era in the overall classical era of poetry. As Romantic poets and Victorian poets (and all poets of all the eras that make up classical poetry) understood, all of poetry is the same; only the themes and major stylistic approaches change. It is only in the modern era of poetry that a wide rejection of this understanding has been undertaken. Today, publishers, other than a few small presses and journals, reject classical poetry styles as being too formal and instead seek out poems with a more "democratic" styling.
The Modern Classical Poetry movement is seeking to change this perspective. How can publishers seriously reject the oldest form of poetic styling and claim that prose in stanza form is the only thing that constitutes poetry? No. Poetry, as generation after generation and literary movement after literary movement understood, is a text which creates a subjective experience through the use of phonetic devices and structured styling.
Modern Classical Poetry is poetry which fits into this classical definition of poetry but which also reflects the modern democratic understanding of the world.
Now wasn't that simple?
Technical Version (without the historical context)
Classical poetry falls under a category of poetry which maintains verse-level constraints, or rules of syntax and line construction, which are key to the very meaning of the poem. Modern Classical Poetry accepts those constraints but reflects on them through a modern lens, adapting them to fit into the modern schema of free expression writing.
