[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry

[TheOldMole]

http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia16-2.html


I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when 
approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that 
of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension. Or poets 
whom I fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies 
turned out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no 
single poem that could stand up as an artifact to the classic poems 
elsewhere in the book. The ultimate standard that I applied in my 
selection process was based on William Butler Yeats’ “The Second 
Coming,” a masterpiece of sinewy modern English.

Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influence on 
other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams), should 
have been automatically included in /Break, Blow, Burn/. But to my 
dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a monotonous 
series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature. The 
equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my original list. But after 
reviewing Auden’s collected poetry, I was stunned to discover how few of 
his poems can stand on their own in today’s media-saturated cultural 
climate.


-- 
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/

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