01-16-2022, 07:59 AM
Modern poetry is so far superior to anything that came before it.
This is, of course, a trend in all fields - from athletics to cricket, from music to physics. We have more people with more leisure time (or at least, time that can be devoted to non-utilitarian activities such as not farming and not forging) now than ever before, with a vaster body of knowledge that's more accessible than ever before, so the eminences of a even few generations ago would be little better than college freshmen today.
This fragment from a poem by the late Craig Arnold compares favourably to anything Eliot wrote. Credit is owed to Hopkins, of course, for the rediscovery of sprung rhythm, and to the savage poets who invented it in the grunting days, but Craig Arnold isn't a household name, and yet what he wrote is up there with the best of the best:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CNO-qEjhtHM/
TL;DR: the past sucked
This is, of course, a trend in all fields - from athletics to cricket, from music to physics. We have more people with more leisure time (or at least, time that can be devoted to non-utilitarian activities such as not farming and not forging) now than ever before, with a vaster body of knowledge that's more accessible than ever before, so the eminences of a even few generations ago would be little better than college freshmen today.
This fragment from a poem by the late Craig Arnold compares favourably to anything Eliot wrote. Credit is owed to Hopkins, of course, for the rediscovery of sprung rhythm, and to the savage poets who invented it in the grunting days, but Craig Arnold isn't a household name, and yet what he wrote is up there with the best of the best:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CNO-qEjhtHM/
TL;DR: the past sucked