A revolutionary literary movement that took place in the first part of the twentieth century represented a paradigm shift in Vietnamese poetry. Known as the New Poetry Movement, it was spawned mainly by contact with Western literary and poetic developments of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Vietnamese poets, eager for modernization, wasted no time to adopt French versification and prosody rules, and in the process began to sever their ties to the old classical poetic tradition. The emergence of this rebellious, energetic movement was not taken gracefully by the old guard, the Ancients, for whom centuries-old tradition was sacrosanct. For a time the war between the Ancients and the Moderns raged mercilessly with the former deriding the upstarts as clueless poetasters with little sense of art or poetry.