10 hours ago
(09-14-2026, 07:45 PM)RiverNotch Wrote: I don't really see it as a problem so much as a challenge. I prefer reading older poets less because I think most poets nowadays are bad---most poets of every age are bad, with the success of Ben Jonson or Pope's Dunciad as good evidence---and more because things so often go back to them. If you want to distinguish yourself as either a writer or as a reader, you have to read a lot of the old farts, either to reference them (for readers, to understand when they're being referenced) or to studiously avoid them. Plus certain old poets survive because they were such masters of their respective forms that it would be stupid not to try and follow their example at some point, whether one desires to generally write in form or not, like how the most accomplished visual artists at one point or another drew nude models. The challenge, then, is how not to get bored reading Pope's perfect couplets (because greatness does not necessarily equate to excitement), or how to find the Shakespeare or Milton of one's era (albeit that probably comes down to luck, more than anything else)." most poets of every age are bad "
Yes indeed, we forget how ruthless the filter of time has been on the art. In any case, quite possibly the majority of what every poet (even an excellent poet) comes up with is second rate at best - compare Titus Andronicus with Hamlet and the 'Scottish play'. Out of the collected poems of Robt. Graves (1975) (that's some 600 poems) I find only a dozen or so appealing, and only maybe half of those really speak to me. But here's the point - for each of us it'll be a different half dozen or so. So as rhe Russian aphorism goes 'each their own taste, said the grandmother, kissing the cow'.