(no subject)

[bursar42]

I had a response to juniperjune's post of March 23. Sadly, though, the clipboard ate it horribly. There was blood and gore everywhere. I shall attempt to put it back together again.

Poetry is not often read because it is seen as "difficult." This perception has everything to do with the highschool canon mentioned in the above post. While nearly everyone can get behind Beowulf to some extent (in a good translation), since it's basically an action movie, a lot of poetry is specifically designed to be... less accessible. I remember, for example, being forced to read some short poem by T.S. Eliot, I think it was. Out of the entire class, only two students could so much as sound the thing out, since that was the number that knew the Greek alphabet. Oddly enough, this snobbery is not welcomed by the general public. Since people are trained from early ages to think of poetry as snobbish, foreign, and rarefied, it will not become popular for the foreseeable future. Nor will it receive much more attention in academic circles (at least in English). For some reason, English is almost solely spoken and written in prose. Perhaps we like things more factual, more definite than other cultures, abstraction is often seen as weak mindedness, or more intelligent than God, neither of which is something which is likely to become popular. Academia, in this case, follows the world. Since prose makes bigger splashes and attracts more material than poetry, it follows that more people would study prose. But fear not. Poetry is not dead. I have a young friend who, I believe, when angry, recites poems form the T'eng Dynasty to calm herself.

Of course, those of you who know me well will remember that I like prose much more than poetry. And so does the majority of the Anglophone world. I wonder when that change came about. I mean, in the early 1600s, poetry was still at the top of the heap in England. Now, though, it's certainly not. Any thoughts?