1 hour ago
I think also that the vast majority of poetry is quite frankly terrible, or at least terrible-to-just-okay, and writing with an affected, old-fashioned voice is a great way to tell if you're writing shittily or not. With contemporary diction it's very easy to delude one's self into thinking one is writing well, in part because there is no established canon for poets past, idk, TS Eliot, so the standards for what's good and what's bad are yet to be fully defined; and also because one can have so many more excuses for when one is writing badly, such as that one is simply "pushing the boundaries of the language" or one is "speaking as naturally as they could", when writing in a contemporary voice, whereas old-fashioned or ornate voices are far more exacting. That's not to say that we should always be writing in old-fashioned styles, but, like, Spenser had a damn good reason to imitate Chaucer when he wrote The Faerie Queene: it's just another device, one poets should be well acquainted with if they're going to be any good.