The Anger of Compassion

"About as popular as Morris dancing..."

...if, perhaps, not as useful.

David Smith of The Observer informs us that poetry may be dying in the UK:

Daisy Goodwin, the TV presenter dubbed the Nigella Lawson of poetry, has warned that the art form of Shakespeare and Keats is dying and set to become as quaint as morris dancing.

As sales of poetry plunge, Goodwin, whose BBC shows feature actors reciting verse, fears it will become extinct from the national culture. 'It will be like morris dancing: really interesting to people who do it, and incomprehensible and slightly annoying to people who don't.

'Twenty years ago everyone could name a Larkin or a Betjeman poem and had read them. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find anybody who could name a poem by any of the top 10 poets today. It's an endangered species.'

Hmmm...I know that I need to revisit Milton this year, and Homer and Shakespeare, too. But then, I'm 46, so I'm perhaps the older reader referred to in the story. And I won't be purchasing the poems I want to read or re-read, as I already have them in the house.

But...but...it's difficult not to blame the poets themselves (and the "knowledgeable" critics). I'm not arguing for "roses are red, violets are blue" here: most of Shakespeare doesn't rhyme, nor does most of Milton. They both employed blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Rhyme wasn't used in Latin poetry at all. But speaking as one who once was, in fact, an English major, I have to say that this has been going on for a long time now, to the point where poets have created the same situation as their analagous practitioners in "modern" art.

That there are talented people struggling away at poetry to this day cannot be doubted. The desire to read poetry for enjoyment will never, I think, be extinct, nor shall the desire to compose it. And your work needn't rhyme in order to be real poetry. No question there, either. But if it neither rhymes nor scans, and you insist on calling it poetry...well, the burden of proof is on you, not on your readers.

Posted by Craig Ceely at January 29, 2006 05:37 PM