Let's talk about feelings

[Joshua Smith]

The average semi professional poet today is better at his craft than Shakespeare, if only because he has access to everything that Shakespeare knew, and what came after. It is no different than the average elite runner being able to break the 4 minute mile today, or the average mathematician today being better at solving any problem than Carl Gauss.
Yet, a lot of modern poetry leaves very little impression on you. There is a sense of repetition, of derivation, a lack of having new things to say, and nearly all poetry in English is just first world problems packaged as ennui. Does anyone else feel this way?

I do feel that there is a lack of new things being said, but I do not believe that this is a new or recent development.  I am not sure that anything new has been stated by humans for thousands of years.  The human experience is trite and common.  Unique or new to me does not equate to actually being unique and new.  I will read tens of thousands of poems in my life.  The vast majority of those with touch on topics already discussed by the others; probably in a manner already done. That is true whether I am reading ancient, classical, modern, even surreal poetry.  Notwithstanding, let us say that out of every thing I read there is one that is utterly different in subject, tone, and mode.  Am I suppose to be foolish enough to think that out of the tens or hundreds of billions of poems compiled throughout human existence there is not at least one more similar to it?  The minuscule sample size that my life will afford me is not sufficient to claim that any anomaly I encounter is not an anomaly already encountered by a multitude of people a multitude of times.  Doing something different from what we know or how we know how to do it is incredibly valuable for expanding our experiences, but to delude ourselves into believing it is new is dangerous.  I am not sure that the goal should be to do something new, but to do whatever it is we decide to do, well.  After which we should strive to improve upon that effort, and that does entail us attempting the unfamiliar.  Shakespeare did not do anything new.  He discussed famous classical literature that a significant portion of the learned population already knew. He adopted poetical forms that had already been in use in a myriad of other cultures. His glory rests on the fact that he executed it well, not that it was novel.  Yes, he took those already used elements and adapted them.  His superb adaption merely a result of an aggregation of his vast human experience.  If we take something that has already been done (which I contend is the only thing we are capable of), and do it well, and then adapt it to our experiences it cannot be a carbon copy of what came before.  But, that does not mean that it is anything novel.  I could go on about the first world problem poems, but I believe one derivative treatise is enough for now.