Poetry in the Modern Age: An Editorial Statement O ne central aspiration of the modern political ideologies was to efface the traditional vocabularies human beings had used to understand their nature and the nature of the world as a whole, and to replace it with a new one. They hoped thereby that a change in language would result also in a change in human nature. As human nature has proven intractable stuff in the face of such a radical program, persons in the modern age find themselves grappling with the same realities as their ancestors, even as they stand bereft of the well-seasoned language needed to understand, express, and confront fruitfully the human condition. Poetry should play a central role in equipping us with language adequate to our experience, but its modern practitioners have more often seemed typical victims of this great forgetting than a bulwark against it. Modernist poetry sought to call everything about the art into question in the ambitious hope of testing the 12 modernagejournal.comhttp://www.modernagejournal.com