Will poetry and poets ever again be important?

[Politruk]

There was a time when poetry mattered. A lot of people outside academia studied, memorized and recited poetry. Poets could be celebrities, like Rudyard Kipling, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson. (Though Dickinson was obscure in her own lifetime.) Poets could even be legendary, semi-divine figures, like Orpheus or Homer.

Poetry even seemed to be one of the markers of a cultural period:

Now in fact these abrupt transitions don't happen, either in politics, manners or literature. Each age lives on into the next — it must do so, because there are innumerable human lives spanning every gap. And yet there are such things as periods. We feel our own age to be deeply different from, for instance, the early Victorian period, and an eighteenth-century sceptic like Gibbon would have felt himself to be among savages if you had suddenly thrust him into the Middle Ages. Every now and again something happens — no doubt it's ultimately traceable to changes in industrial technique, though the connexion isn't always obvious — and the whole spirit and tempo of life changes, and people acquire a new outlook which reflects itself in their political behaviour, their manners, their architecture, their literature and everything else. No one could write a poem like Gray's ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ today, for instance, and no one could have written Shakespeare's lyrics in the age of Gray. These things belong in different periods. And though, of course, those black lines across the page of history are an illusion, there are times when the transition is quite rapid, sometimes rapid enough for it to be possible to give it a fairly accurate date. One can say without grossly over-simplifying, ‘About such and such a year, such and such a style of literature began.’ If I were asked for the starting-point modern literature — and the fact that we still call it ‘modern’ shows that this particular period isn't finished yet — I should put it at 1917, the year in which T. S. Eliot published his poem ‘Prufrock’. At any rate that date isn't more than five years out. It is certain that about the end of the last war the literary climate changed, the typical writer came to be quite a different person, and the best books of the subsequent period seemed to exist in a different world from the best books of only four or five years before.

To illustrate what I mean, I ask you to compare in your mind two poems, which haven't any connexion with one another, but which will do for purposes of comparison because each is entirely typical of its period. Compare, for instance, one of Eliot's characteristic earlier poems with a poem of Rupert Brooke, who was, I should say, the most admired English poet in the years before 1914. Perhaps the most representative of Brooke's poems are his patriotic ones, written in the early days of the war. A good one is the sonnet beginning

“If I should die, think only this of me:
‘That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England”

Now read side by side with this one of Eliots's Sweeney poems; for example, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ — you know,

‘The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate’

As I say, these poems have no connexion in theme or anything else, but it's possible in a way to compare them, because each is representative of its own time and each seemed a good poem when it was written. The second still seems a good poem now.

-- George Orwell, "The Rediscovery of Europe," 1942.

Poetry now seems to be a dying art apart from song lyrics. Who is now writing poetry that future generations of English students will study and discuss? What is being recited at open-mic poetry slams that anyone but that night's audience will ever hear or read?

 

[Politruk]

Orwell again:

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough's ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this.

"Rudyard Kipling," 1942.

 

[Politruk]

xxxx

 

[calmlikeabomb]

Does it matter? Times will change and things will fall in and out of favour. If we look at things from the lense of a popularity contest, then in the long term, nothing is important. But in this moment in time, someone somewhere may enjoy or find meaning in a couplet or a Limerick or an old epic. Such is life.

 

[Politruk]

Does it matter? Times will change and things will fall in and out of favour. If we look at things from the lense of a popularity contest, then in the long term, nothing is important. But in this moment in time, someone somewhere may enjoy or find meaning in a couplet or a Limerick or an old epic. Such is life.

It seems impossible that poetry will ever even come back to its former cultural importance.

 

[calmlikeabomb]

Doesn't matter. People who want to will find their way to it.

 

[Angeline]

It seems impossible that poetry will ever even come back to its former cultural importance.

Nor will reading (outside of online sources and social media), traditional scholarship or many one-time cultural juggernauts that seem to have faded with the twentieth century. That's very sad and imho a sign of civilization's decay. On the other hand (and as Calm said) there will always be people who value poetry and want to read, hear and/or write it. The survival of this forum for 20+ years is testament to that.

Also, the poetry you've mentioned in this thread is all representative of the Western Canon. Poetry has been an important part of many cultures. I believe it's still valued worldwide in many cultural traditions, maybe not like it once was but hey tempus fugit, right?

 

[Politruk]

Who is now writing poetry that future generations of English students will study and discuss? What is being recited at open-mic poetry slams that anyone but that night's audience will ever hear or read?

Does anybody know?

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't know whether it'll be taught at schools, but I refuse to consider poetry dead when people are still writing works like this:

 

[Cagivagurl]

The world is cyclical. Old becomes new...
Fashions change, and people continue to have questions...
Poetry is the eternal question wrapped in prose.
People will tire of technology...
Minds still need to be prised open...
The future is unknow.
Each day must be cherished as the gift it is.
Nobody knows what tomorrow brings...
All we can do is hope and do what we can to encourage.
Poetry is to beautiful to lose.

Cagivagurl

 

[42BelowsBack]

Poems never stopped being important.

 

[_Land]

Poetry comes in many forms, it's not just in what's called a poem. Poetry comes in the form of music and anthems and rally cries that will be remembered forever.

I think a lot of it is based on your individual definition of poetry.

Poetry is not just print in a book