Yesterday, 07:28 PM
[quote="busker" pid='283676' dateline='1793337939']
The main reason why I don’t think highly of modern poets is that they are the same shallow, artsy types with no life experience, writing endlessly about the trivial problems of their modern American urban existence. Earlier western poets weren’t such useless pansies. Poe died of rabies and Marlowe got stabbed. Goethe was an administrator. Shakespeare was a wily businessman first and a writer of comedies second. Radnoti was killed by the Nazis.
At last someone with the guts to state this out loud! Regardless of form, the subjects of most modern poems are alternatively utterly banal or artificially obscure, and thus uninteresting to most 'ordinary' folk (i.e. non-poets). I strongly suspect a poets' cult has developed, the members of which, write, share, criticise and publish each others' work regardless of its interest to the population at large. Which is why the poetry section of most bookshops is a pure token gesture. If we want public to read and remember our poetry, we should write about things that have perennially interested them.
The main reason why I don’t think highly of modern poets is that they are the same shallow, artsy types with no life experience, writing endlessly about the trivial problems of their modern American urban existence. Earlier western poets weren’t such useless pansies. Poe died of rabies and Marlowe got stabbed. Goethe was an administrator. Shakespeare was a wily businessman first and a writer of comedies second. Radnoti was killed by the Nazis.
At last someone with the guts to state this out loud! Regardless of form, the subjects of most modern poems are alternatively utterly banal or artificially obscure, and thus uninteresting to most 'ordinary' folk (i.e. non-poets). I strongly suspect a poets' cult has developed, the members of which, write, share, criticise and publish each others' work regardless of its interest to the population at large. Which is why the poetry section of most bookshops is a pure token gesture. If we want public to read and remember our poetry, we should write about things that have perennially interested them.
"Whenever you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover" J. K. Galbraith, The Observer, 21 June 1998