Poetry and the Masses

[heslopian]

Making poetry more accessible is fine and good, but the path to that end isn't in changing poetry itself, but public attitudes towards it. One wouldn't try to arouse public interest in science by dumbing it down, restricting its progress, generalising and neutralising it, so nobody has to use or improve their minds and everyone can share the same degraded shit. Rather, we should be teaching people that poetry as it is isn't so impenetrable as snotty English teachers make it seem. Frankly, I'd also rather burn every poem than watch them be reduced to banalities for the sake of the intellectually lazy.