Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month

[TranquillityBase]

All this is to say, Eliot's overrated. Mightily, mightily overrated. Not least because I don't think poetry's dead, it's just found (or is presently searching for) a new medium or media. The dramatic poets of Ancient Greece had to incorporate choruses and depict the action only of a single day, their medium being necessarily a community ritual. Ancient Rome's metropolitan sophistication made "ritual" more "theatre" in the modern sense of the word, and it was the likes of Ben Jonson and, everyone's favourite, Christopher Marlowe that made contemporary dramatic poetry more of a written medium, at least by my understanding. Now it's moving on again to film -- see Andrei Tarkovsky's work, with his father being an acclaimed Russian poet. For lyric poetry, it's the phonograph that "killed" that, or rather tranformed bards and troubadours into rockstars, rappers, and folkies; for epic poetry, well, you have mass literacy making that an increasingly rare medium, and no honest lover of the written word would fault that. Just as no honest reader of poetry would wish away the likes of libgen or project gutenberg or wikimedia commons, giving access to poor sods like me books that aren't even shipped to my country.

Hey Rivernotch,

Thanks for your whole essay....if you are not a writer of essays, you should be...anyway, of the many profound things you point out, I highlighted the one that made me sit up and listen.  

I sampled (a very small sample) of Instagram poetry.  Most was terrible but then I came across one that was really amazing.  So there must be many more out there, though I hope something better than Instagram is poetry's next haven.  Then again it may already be out there and in a form not yet discerned by my feeble vision.

TqB

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“The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot....”

I don’t get that impression from reading Ted Kooser or Ruth Stone

Yes, and I think his defining a "default register" for poetry since 1920 is a generality too far, even limiting it to English, as he does somewhere else in the essay.