Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month

[RiverNotch]

I think the larger question is why the general public hasn't heard of Ocean Vuong or Ted Kooser, while Tennyson or Eliot were much better known in their times.
And here, I disagree with that assertion in the first place.
The average factory worker or farmhand, to say nothing of gardeners, wouldn't have heard of Tennyson. Or if he had, it'd have been when Tennyson had already become a public celebrity at 80. The average man in industrial age Britain would've worked his 12 hours and have spent his leisure time at the pub and the football.
Tennyson and Eliot loom large in the Anglosphere because they have been made to loom large through universal school education, and later, widespread university education in the 20th century. It all worked very well for the first few generations. The canon was small, and universally accepted. But in a finite number of schooling years, and in minutes within that that can be earmarked for literature, you can fit in Dylan Thomas only if you exclude someone else.

It's quite as simple as that. The poets after Eliot don't  feature as much in the popular imagination because there was never any space for them in the syllabus.

I find this kinda beautifully said, too. I'm under the impression that, in America, they're working to include other minority voices to the canon, but the work seems rather scattershot, not because of any faults in the poets, but because there doesn't seem to be much concerted effort in who should these poets be. There could also be some sort of whitewashing going on, with the likes of Dumas being black perhaps not being well known enough, or maybe America just isn't there yet when it comes to culture: the way America's education, especially in the arts, is underfunded might be emblematic of how the country lost the plot when it comes to having erudite citizens being both cultured and specialized. But really I have no idea.

Here, I'm under the impression poets aren't that big, simply because most people are too poor -- too busy and ill-educated, what with corruption and even violence between higher ups being ubiquitous -- to seriously take in Shakespeare or even just Balagtas, much less someone like Conchitina Cruz. Though I'd imagine it was much the same in the past, and one reason why we have a small canon (or at least, why high schools and below have a small canon) was because there was not enough people reading to preserve certain works, however great they were. A better attitude than lamenting the "death" of this or that culture is probably to be grateful Langston Hughes or the Perle poet or Sappho even survived the ages.