 |
 |
> >Every generation bemoans the fact that nobody cares about poetry, and every >generation is wrong. Maybe the confusion stems from the misconception that >poems are or ever will be a profit-making commodity in the way that videos >are. I'm glad they're not. Can you imagine the problems we'd have casting? > > >Cassie It's worth remembering that for the most part the societal reception of poetry contemporary to most moments in the past has been severely class restricted. This may appear to us not to have been the case because the class it was restricted to was so influential (and so loaded). The citizens of Hull who erected the statue of Marvell probably didn't know his verse or even that he wrote it. The very few exceptions are mostly in the 19th century, and often for reasons that have little to do with what we value. Byron was scandalous, Wordsworth and Tennyson were moral education, Whitman (late in his life) was cultural nationalism. Popular ballads and lyrics are a different case. Until the present they have only been recognized as poetry by the educated classes long after they were first sung, when they had acquired the charms of nostalgia. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%