01-26-2022, 11:55 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-26-2022, 12:01 PM by RiverNotch.)
I like the Craig Arnold shared here, and I love your mention of Walt Whitman and Lennon-McCartney in the same breath, Mark! though "When Lilacs..." is the superior Lincoln elegy, for me, and I'm not sure I read much JFK in the Beatles -- MLK, definitely, what with "Revolution" being a response to the supposedly more radical strains of thought and action in both sides of the pond, and Nina Simone specifically being pissed about it. But chiefly, I am glad that you, busker, didn't share an Instagram poet, only an Instagram'd poet: normally Instagram's an argument against contemporary poetry. xD
I wrote about the difference between our age and the past, but discarded it when I realized that our age really isn't much different than the age of Shakespeare or Chaucer -- it's just the people who live like Shakespeare or Chaucer in this age of electricity and antibiotics don't get published as much as we lucky bourgeoisie. The past seems better only because history has made its judgments for us, not so much in openly dictating what is great and what is not, but in preserving so little compared to all that we have now. The average aesthete, by virtue of our liberal education and even the internet, is more likely to come up with something half-way decent, but it too-often takes a certain poverty to possess any kind of soul. I don't think our age is any better than the past, in terms of art: we're just lucky enough to see more of it.
I wrote about the difference between our age and the past, but discarded it when I realized that our age really isn't much different than the age of Shakespeare or Chaucer -- it's just the people who live like Shakespeare or Chaucer in this age of electricity and antibiotics don't get published as much as we lucky bourgeoisie. The past seems better only because history has made its judgments for us, not so much in openly dictating what is great and what is not, but in preserving so little compared to all that we have now. The average aesthete, by virtue of our liberal education and even the internet, is more likely to come up with something half-way decent, but it too-often takes a certain poverty to possess any kind of soul. I don't think our age is any better than the past, in terms of art: we're just lucky enough to see more of it.