Poetry will never matter as a major art form again

A couple of introductory comments. First, who knows, someday we may be sitting on Dune huffing spice with Thufir Hawat playing the lute and regaling us with his verse. I’m talking about the world as we know it. It would take big cultural changes for poetry to matter again.

Second, I’ve written a lot of poetry, and I think my stuff’s really good, and I’ve had to accept that, no matter how good it is, it will never have a cultural impact or be remembered over the long term. So I’m not pissing on someone else’s territory; I’m pissing on my own.

Way back in 1991, Dana Gioia wrote the devastating essay Can Poetry Matter? He later became Poet Laureate of the United States and walked some of his comments back, IIRC, but still, everything he said is just as true today, and since then we’ve had 24 more years of people not giving a shit about poetry added to the pile of not mattering.

I’m going to try to add to Dana’s already exhaustive explication of the causes of why we are where we are today with respect to poetry. In fact I’m going to go a bit more macro and say this: Society has shed several categories of fame and admiration since the end of WWII.

Most of these require caveats, but the overall pattern should be apparent: We don’t have famous composers any more (outside of movie composers, and we haven’t had a truly “major” composer since Shostakovitch). We don’t have authors that are both famous and seen as writing material that will last (I’m not sure any author, even if they are approved of by TPTB in literary circles, is seen as having lasting impact or fame along the lines of a Hemingway or Fitzgerald–no, not Franzen, either). We have rich, prominent artists like Damien Hirst, but we do not have anyone who is recognized as “great” by the culture, such as Picasso.

And we sure as hell don’t have any famous poets. I don’t even need a caveat on this one. Probably the last of that breed was Rod McKuen, who died recently. He is actually the best-selling poet in the history of the world, but he was trashed from the beginning by the intelligentsia, and his work has pretty much been forgotten.

Now you can pick at some of my points above, but let’s look at the big picture: Until sometime in the 1950s, you had giants of art that were recognized culture-wide as giants. Dali, Bernstein, Frost–the names just pop. We don’t have that today. The people that can expect to get fame and genuine respect as artists today are in popular music, film, and TV. We simply have lost our social mechanism, if you will, for creating famous people outside those categories.

I’d like to suggest some causes for why this is so, and why poetry has been hit even harder.

First, the causes of the general phenomenon:

• Technology changed. Visual entertainment like motion pictures and video games gave people experiences they preferred to others. There is only so much mindshare to go around, so other media lost out.

• The long tail phenomenon. People are enjoying more of everything, and the evolution of content distribution systems, especially the Internet, has allowed everyone to be in their own bubble of what they like. This greatly dilutes the potential for any one thing being “big.”

• The sharing of global content also reduces the demand for local content. You can get into your local band scene, or you can go on Spotify and listen to stuff from around the world. The death of the local newspaper means you don’t need local writers. The few can supply the many, worldwide. This in turn gives the wannabes the incentive to give away their content for free, creating further noise in the system and a great glut of supply.

• The rise of literacy and leisure time in the 20th century created an overabundance of artists of every stripe. Every Tom, Dick, and Harriet trying to be a novelist/poet/painter/singer/songwriter created a highly noisy system in which it is hard to get noticed, even if you are very good. Moreover, there is a human tendency to look down upon that which is abundant and respect that which is scarce. Although, for example, people still enjoy their popular novelists, the fact that someone can write well no longer accords respect.

• By the same token, film/TV/video games are expensive to create and have a natural scarcity factor. Only so many major motion pictures can be produced in a year, and thus those associated with these productions gain considerable prestige.

• But TV and popular music are in danger of falling victim to the same phenomenon. The No. 1 show in 2014, The Big Bang Theory, would have ranked No. 57 in 1994. I find that to be a mindblowing statistic. I don’t think I need to say much about the cratering of the music industry.

• Current content must compete with the content of the past. Kids don’t have to listen to new bands; they can listen to the Beatles and Stones, and they certainly do avail themselves of anything and everything. The same goes for any type of written content. Why read some dickhead’s chapbook when you probably won’t have enough time in your lifetime to go through Donne, Keats, Dickinson, et al.?

• The media simply lost the narrative of the “great artists” living and dead that we all need to respect. At the same time, individual media have lost a lot of their power. Being on Ed Sullivan or Oprah could make you as an artist. I’m not sure being on Ellen’s show can do the same thing these days (TV still retains a lot of power because of its scarcity, however).

The TL;DR version of the above is that the supply of art has vastly increased, while our ability to process it all has not, reducing the potential for any one person to be seen as “great.”

All of the above applies to poetry, but there are some additional points that work against it in particular:

• Poetry is the most difficult of artistic media to enjoy. It is language-specific and requires a high degree of literacy. It is harder even than literary fiction, on average, and the latter has suffered as well for this reason.

• Poetry is the least entertaining of artistic media. Poetry can be very interesting, intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and meaning; it can thus feel good in the mind, but aside from light, humorous verse, it is not entertaining per se. I would say that even recondite, abstract art is entertaining in a way that poetry is not.

• Thus, poetry was never all that popular to begin with. This requires a big caveat. Poets like Longfellow were basically writing novels in verse form that captured the public imagination. Evangeline was genuinely huge. But I don’t think the masses in the 19th century were so very much into poetry per se. Then again, there was a huge craving for content then (supply and demand were in the opposite relationship to what they are now), that a competent poet would have a chance of selling their work on some scale or another. Once you get into the 20th century and people had recorded music and movies, I think the status of poetry was always precarious, and it lasted as long as it did because of the legacy cultural narrative of the time, which the big media bought into.

• People now get their poetry fix from song lyrics and rap. Pretty simple. People do want poetic, meaningful words in their lives, but they get that from music now. This is probably the biggest factor of all, the ultimate killer of poetry.

Looking into the future as best as I can, I think 100 years from now the world of art will be even more diluted. We may very well not have popular music as we know it then. Poetry will be even more of a niche interest than it is now, like stamp or coin collecting.

By the way, I think it is insane that people go to MFA programs to study poetry and become better poets. Forgive me, but LULZ!

What do you think? Is there anything I’m missing?

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s really just an evolution of the art form.

This analysis of modern art seems appropriate. 4 Ways Pop Culture Critics Have Made Themselves Obsolete | Cracked.com

Andi think that any solo art , like a poem, will nowadays be less attractieve then s joint project, like a video clip.

Myles na gCopeleen, aka Flann O’Brien ( Brian O’Nolan ) pointed out — accounting for the dearth of artistic endeavour in the Ireland of the 1940s — that great art can only be fostered and appreciated in an aristocratic society.
All societies are in fact aristocratic societies of course, whether the dulled lower orders realise this or not, but he meant formal aristocracies who could be both patrons and arbiters.
This may account for the fact that the USA, despite having some phenomenal artists and exciting schools of artists, has never developed a grand tradition of Art and is generally disrespected as an artistic foundry. They were suspicious and rejecting to Art, therefore Art suspects and rejects them.

Plus of course the Babbitry, viewing Art as an ornament; alongside the exultation in the dismissive crudity of self-praising irreverence and debunking so distressingly common in the 19th and 20th centuries.

[ Also I believe that in Britain at least, there has been a deliberate dumbing-down of the populace to keep them politically neutral, and to keep them unquestioning of the mantras and verities that encourage their quiescence. Through both the vulgarity of mass media and sport. I like to think that had the Ancient Greeks had the internet they would have embraced it to make themselves more aware rather than as a conduit for advertising — and I don’t even care for the Ancient Greeks that much. ]

I think part of the reason for this is that modern poetry his largely given up using rhyme and meter (for various reasons, some good, some arbitrary), which are among the main things that make poetry appeal to people and help them to find it entertaining.

I don’t understand the premise. Song lyrics are poetry.

There is still plenty of poetry. It is just now we put it to music and call them song lyrics.

And yes most of it is bad but most of poetry was bad; we just remember the good ones.

Read that when it came out. On target and funny. Of course, he’s done nothing for Cracked lately. :dubious:

Interesting thought.

Although, now, does any society exist that can do it?

I agree. What I think is noticed less that poetry became very negative at the same time. Confident 19th century verse proclaiming the Truth gave way to Elliott and his imitators pissing and moaning about the Wasteland. It’s never recovered from that downertude, and it’s no wonder that people look back to the 1800s and earlier for their poetry fix. Whitman is an example of someone, one of the few, really, who wrote mostly in free verse but still kept the poetry big and positive. So he remains popular.

As I said in the OP…

I don’t think song lyrics are actually poetry in the same way that Keats’s poetry was poetry, but I think they do serve the same need for a lot of people.

In what sense are they not? And if one takes an existing poem and sets it to music, does it cease to be a poem?

Yeah, I think the OP’s points are well taken, but to them must be appended that poetry itself has turned to shit. Yes, poetry is a difficult art form to master. But the vast majority of the people who decide to pursue it were made to feel like it would be easy, thanks to free verse. Free verse wasn’t invented to make poetry easier – it was tacitly assumed that those who worked in it would do what poets had always done, drink deeply from the well of the past and use what they found there to create new kinds of verse. It was meant as a new kind of challenge. Instead, it ended up providing an excuse to skip immersing yourself in the ancient waters, training your ear on the confluence and dissonance of sound and sense by unearthing what our ancestors had already discovered, and putting your hands to the craft work of composing to a specific beat and a specific line length and make your theme come alive not in spite of the constrictions, but because of them. All across America for nearly a century, poetry has become the artform where you don’t have to master any basics, and everyone has lost respect for it.

Free verse isn’t poetry; it’s prose with oddly-spaced carriage returns. What makes poetry what it is is that it’s constrained in some way independent of the meaning. That constraint might be a particular rhyme scheme, or alliteration, or meter, or something else or a combination of such factors, but if there’s no constraint, then it’s not poetry.

Of course, there’s still plenty of constrained poetry, too.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s not poetry per se. It’s certainly verse, because the line turns for reasons other than you’ve run out of room on the right side of the page. That is one important tool of poetry, so important that ‘verse’ is synonymous with poetry most of the time. Mind you, there was before the last century the assumption that such a turning marked off a metered quantity of rhythm. My point, though, is that poetry that rewards attention has been written in free verse – most reliably by people who cut their teeth on more formal verse, and yet occasionally by the proverbial monkeys with typewriters. Verse forms were designed around the poetic elements that occur naturally in the language, but the language churns up beauty unbidden all the time.

But… yeah, free verse kind of has a higher burden to prove itself poetry. But it’s popular because people think the standard is actually lower. Not lower, indeed. Just more vague.

I will stake this as an essentialism: poetry is rhythm. Everything else is a spicing up of the basic recipe. Even the turning of the line is in essence a function of rhythm.

ONE thing hasn’t changed, and will never change–not when Horace was writing poetry (which was typically accompanied by lyre, I believe), not when they rioted over the Rites of Spring, not now, and not when we are huffing spice with Thufir Hawat–the literati will sneer at the *popular *stuff that is enjoyed by the *common *people, and declaim that the good stuff is not appreciated any more.

Or, again, there is no definition of poetry that does not include rap. John Williams writes orchestral music. Time will winnow out the crap and leave the good stuff, and in 2115 someone will be posting about how the giants of the past, like Eminem and Jay-Z, will nevermore be seen.

I mean, seriously, Bernstein? How much credit did the literati give him for *West Side Story *in 1957? Didn’t they say that this modern musical theater was nothing like the greats like Offenbach?

Yet to some extent, that was an inescapable reaction to those parts of the 19th century that were banal and sententious.

[ However I still prefer Biedermeier to Art Deco. ]

By ‘now’ do you mean presently or ever ? Ever: there are distinct if brief periods where art commonly informs life and a plethora of great art is created, Japanese pottery, French 18th - 19th centuries, the main body of English Lit, Greek vases, German philosophy etc. etc… It may not embody all of the folk, but a fair amount with aspirations.

But as I implied, due to a native canniness and respect for the bottom dollar, great art ( and again I emphasize there have been geniuses ) never caught on in America. The Whistlers and Poes were neglected until liking them was profitable. As Good Mr. Bryson says, “I somehow doubt that if the Duc d’Urbino was brought back to life and deposited in downtown Cleveland he would say, 'Goodness, I am put in mind of fifteenth-century Florence and all the many treasures therein.'”
And of course there’s folk art — or petty art — but we don’t really have even that now. Where I would say there’s some considerable genius in art going on now, is in computer art, such as on Manga and Anime boards, from the far east mainly.
Here’s a painting from a new game, The Rainy Port Keelung, of a ship by a dock in the rain, around 1947. It seems to me as good as any other acclaimed works of the past. And there does seem much traditional — of the western manner — art being made in Russia. Plus of course, photography is now so good we can see plenty of charming girls without the veils of paint or mystery.

To me, the fundamental problem with poetry - especially modern poetry - is that it has lost the ability to appeal to people at multiple levels.

As an example, take a movie. You can enjoy a movie with popcorn as a fun way to pass a couple of hours. You can also be a movie critic and get into deep analysis of the meaning, productions quality, etc.

Or a painting. I can look at the Mona Lisa and think “That’s a nice painting” even while the art critic beside me is wetting his pants over technique and interpretation and historical context. We can all enjoy that painting on any level we choose to.

But modern poetry is just pretentious nonsense produced to impress other pretentious people. It is no longer intended to be enjoyed by everyone. In fact, I’m not sure it’s meant be enjoyed by anyone. It’s a small clique of people strutting around for each other’s benefit.

When I think of poetry that I’ve actually enjoyed in my life, it’s Shel Silverstein and… no, just him. I don’t know how the critics rate him on the modern scale of pretentious nonsense, but I truly enjoy reading his writing. There are not many people out there like him and they’re often titled cartoonists or humorists or something other than poets.

(By the way a little biographical note: I grew up with exposure to poetry. My father was in love with ee cummings and my mother wrote - and had published - poetry of her own. In school, I won more than one poetry contest myself. I can imitate pretentious nonsense with the best of them.)

In NYC they have poetry selected and posted in the subway cars. I read some good poems while riding the subway. But the problem is, they just have a fleeting effect. I remember them for 10 minutes or a day. But a song you remember because you hear it over and over again. IDK how this compares to TV and movies, a lot of them we rewatch, some of them we don’t. A sad movie like Requiem For A Dream I will probably never rewatch. But 15 years later I still remember some of the plot points. IDK why but poetry is just not as memorable. Even if it’s good.