05-16-2022, 01:27 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-16-2022, 01:28 AM by RiverNotch.)
The internet era, since I'm currently living in it.
But no, I really do think it's the internet era, just because so much good poetry from all over the world is available now, compared to every era beforehand. Perhaps poetry was more "respected" before the Romantics (not that it prevented bad poets of the time from getting published -- bad poets laymen don't hear about due to history's funny way of working), but if I were born where I am now during that time, even in the same socioeconomic class, I would never have heard of Shakespeare, or even Dante and Virgil. Modernity is a double-edged sword which I wouldn't even be cognizant of if, compared to previous eras, one of its edges were not so strongly in my favor.
That said, for me most of the prettiest stuff came from before the Romantics. I suspect it's a consequence of the way the culture changed radically during that time. Linguistically, the Great Vowel Shift occurred from around 1400 to 1700, and English hasn't changed as radically since, so the principles behind people saying this or that sounds prettiest just stuck, while culturally, English really started to spread during the Romantic era, which meant much more homogenous standards of beauty before that. The best version of the Bible is still the Authorized Version, and Shakespeare is to us what Virgil and Ovid were to him. But Troilus and Cressida isn't even in bookstores here, while Wikimedia Commons has Dr. Samuel Johnson's editions of the plays in the First Folio for free. God bless the internet.
But no, I really do think it's the internet era, just because so much good poetry from all over the world is available now, compared to every era beforehand. Perhaps poetry was more "respected" before the Romantics (not that it prevented bad poets of the time from getting published -- bad poets laymen don't hear about due to history's funny way of working), but if I were born where I am now during that time, even in the same socioeconomic class, I would never have heard of Shakespeare, or even Dante and Virgil. Modernity is a double-edged sword which I wouldn't even be cognizant of if, compared to previous eras, one of its edges were not so strongly in my favor.
That said, for me most of the prettiest stuff came from before the Romantics. I suspect it's a consequence of the way the culture changed radically during that time. Linguistically, the Great Vowel Shift occurred from around 1400 to 1700, and English hasn't changed as radically since, so the principles behind people saying this or that sounds prettiest just stuck, while culturally, English really started to spread during the Romantic era, which meant much more homogenous standards of beauty before that. The best version of the Bible is still the Authorized Version, and Shakespeare is to us what Virgil and Ovid were to him. But Troilus and Cressida isn't even in bookstores here, while Wikimedia Commons has Dr. Samuel Johnson's editions of the plays in the First Folio for free. God bless the internet.