The present is a gift

[busker]

Modern poetry is so far superior to anything that came before it.
This is, of course, a trend in all fields - from athletics to cricket, from music to physics. We have more people with more leisure time (or at least, time that can be devoted to non-utilitarian activities such as not farming and not forging) now than ever before, with a vaster body of knowledge that's more accessible than ever before, so the eminences of a even few generations ago would be little better than college freshmen today.

This fragment from a poem by the late Craig Arnold compares favourably to anything Eliot wrote. Credit is owed to Hopkins, of course, for the rediscovery of sprung rhythm, and to the savage poets who invented it in the grunting days, but Craig Arnold isn't a household name, and yet what he wrote is up there with the best of the best:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNO-qEjhtHM/

TL;DR: the past sucked

[TranquillityBase]

Modern poetry is so far superior to anything that came before it.
This is, of course, a trend in all fields - from athletics to cricket, from music to physics. We have more people with more leisure time (or at least, time that can be devoted to non-utilitarian activities such as not farming and not forging) now than ever before, with a vaster body of knowledge that's more accessible than ever before, so the eminences of a even few generations ago would be little better than college freshmen today.

This fragment from a poem by the late Craig Arnold compares favourably to anything Eliot wrote. Credit is owed to Hopkins, of course, for the rediscovery of sprung rhythm, and to the savage poets who invented it in the grunting days, but Craig Arnold isn't a household name, and yet what he wrote is up there with the best of the best:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNO-qEjhtHM/

TL;DR: the past sucked

Maybe modern poetry seems superior because we are modern readers?  I also question that poetry has evolved because we have more leisure time and vaster knowledge, or that poetry (as I think you are saying) is a science.   

No doubt there are more poets and more ways to publish, but what's lacking are enough Pig Pens to hold their work up to some kind of peer review.  In that regard, poetry's evolution has been retarded.

Thanks for the tip on Craig Arnold.

[Mark A Becker]

busker: "Modern poetry is so far superior to anything that came before it".
Tim: "Maybe modern poetry seems superior because we are modern readers?"

“If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The same can be said of modern poetry. We have access to such a wide range of brilliant poets, past and present.

To me, it does not matter the time period, though a poem's place in time often conveys context.  I just know what resonates with me, and that can shift depending upon the day, and my mood, much like music.  I have been fascinated with trying to create poems for so long that I almost cannot remember a time when I wasn't. 

No matter how much I read other poets, and no matter how much I write, I find myself continually fascinated by the interplay of words.  I have not really considered whether modern poetry is, in fact, superior.  Like I said, I just know what resonates. Then I get very curious as to how and why that happens. 

(btw- Thanks for the Craig Arnold link, busker.)

[TranquillityBase]

  I find myself continually fascinated by the interplay of words. 

That interplay is on display just about any time you encounter words, spoken, written, or however the encounter occurs.  There's poetry all around us, not called out as such, thanks to the media world we live in.  So maybe Busker is right in additional/another way....to live in an environment like we do, does make the past seem pretty destitute.

But yes, context....one thing superior about the old masters is getting to live in their minds for a bit, no matter how constricted, like say, the Beowulf poet.  Going into the mind of a contemporary poet lacks that....whatever you want to call it....exploration?

[Mark A Becker]

That interplay is on display just about any time you encounter words, spoken, written, or however the encounter occurs.  There's poetry all around us, ...

This is part of why I point to context, and very briefly explain that in terms of history.  Much of what we learn about an historical event often omits the broader context in which those events occurred.  News of the Lincoln assasination states the facts, yet Whitman's "O Captain, My Captain" enlarges the frame beyond the details of those facts. The context of the aftermath of the J.F.Kennedy assasination is similarly enlarged by the Beatles capturing the youth of America.

While these are paltry examples, my point is that arts, including poetry, have always helped fill in the frames of history.  So, going back to your statement that, "Maybe modern poetry seems superior because we are modern readers?", makes an important observation that we tend to see things from the vantage point of our lived experiences. 

To broaden that point just a bit, I well remember that MLK was seen as a radical, and divisive voice in early '60s America, though that image has been quite literally whitewashed.  Some school districts are trying to "modernize" his wrtings/speeches 60 years later.  Is the modern version superior?  Hardly. It will begin to require deeper investigation for coming generations to even try to understand the context in which he originally spoke. 

My main point still being, without knowing the context of a time period, it becomes very difficult to determine that modern poetry is actually superior.  What is modern today, won't be in just a few years. "Superior", to me, remains a matter of personal preference. 

With each new generation, the zeitgeist continues to shift. All that said, I do appreciate that busker stated a definite position to start this discussion.

[busker]

Walt Whitman is worth considering
He was a man well ahead of his time. But his “O Captain” poem is very traditional
Today it strikes us as being a bit over the top but the raw emotion in it was fit for the occasion and relevant to its time.

---

Was MLK a radical? Much less than the Bolshevik, so hard to see it that way now, but maybe for white America back in the day he was a revolutionary

[Mark A Becker]

Was MLK a radical? Much less than the Bolshevik, so hard to see it that way now, but maybe for white America back in the day he was a revolutionary

Even some black leaders viewed him as too strident, and divisive: the link below gives insight as to how MLK took it from all sides:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/...ot-214637/

While I mostly agree with the statement you offered to start this discussion, I still believe that "superior" is highly subjective.  It's easier to identify crappy poetry of yesteryear because we simply don't have access to most of what may have been written, much less spoken. 

I am quite sure, that as inventive as humans are, that some great, very early poems/stories have long since been lost to time. Our modern access is now our measure of superiority.  (Even though the floodgates of modern communication systems have also passed a considerable amount of sewage). 

Good topic to explore, busker.  Thanks.

[abu nuwas]

Full marks for making a sufficiently outlandish claim as to wake people -even me - up!  

My immediate thoughts were a ) that I have looked and looked for modern poetry which had just something, without success; and b ) I am not modern, so perhaps, that would account for much.  

Being of a pernickety nature, I was instantly drawn to examine the claim about modern athletes and cricketers being better than their sporting forbears. I looked at records for cricketers: Hobbs still stands, Bradman, for runs,  and although wiki does not say so, I recall that at least until recently, WG Grace, in addition to his batting heroics, held the all-time record for catches.  Then again, the pitches were more rough, matches were of varying lengths, and bats nothing like what is available today. When Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, he had nothing like the footwear now worn. For me, it is impossible to make the comparison. 

So much for the stuffiness! In truth, I was raised on 19th century poems at home, and early 20th century ones at what passed for school. In addition, one teacher introduced us rather oafish boys to Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' - he would read so much, and then at another lesson, these same oafs (dont moi) would be begging for him to continue. It was good rolling stuff, as so much of the poetry we had was. It had been written, after all, in times when there was no radio, TV or gramophone. To read was an 'accomplishment' and anyone who has heard people who read badly, will know what a useful one it was. (I would advise anyone, modern or not, to listen Richard Burton reciting the 'Ancient Mariner' - and read). 

The imp of the perverse on my shoulder is egging me on to remind anyone who reads this of the old dictum: ''Nothing dates so much as modernity''. 

PS  I did read a couple of poems by the man you mentioned 'Mulberry' and 'Artichoke'.  No need for me to trash them: but they did not seem to overwhelm Shelley Keats, Tennyson and co. Or Chaucer.

[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.