So, what happened? Is it that poet songwriters seized the mantle? Or is something else going on?Īn opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “ Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month” blames T. S. We might have to go back to the 19th century: to Poe or Tennyson or Emerson or Emma Lazarus or Julia Ward Howe or James Whitcomb Riley or Clement Clarke Moore. I fear that the correct answer might be none of the above. cummings or Robert Frost or Langston Hughes or Vachel Lindsay or T. S. I sometimes ask myself who was the last poet who ordinary American adults might quote? Was it Dylan Thomas (“Do not go gently into that good night”)? William Butler Yeats (“Things fall apart”)? Robert Frost (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”)? Allen Ginsberg (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed”)? Or was it Carl Sandburg or Gertrude Stein or Stephen Vincent Benét or e.e. The share of adults who said that they had read a poem (not plural) not for school or work, 12 percent in 2017, was nearly a third less than in 1992.
While the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts claimed that 28 million Americans (two-thirds women) had read a poem in the last year and CNN proclaims that “Poetry is experiencing a new golden age,” one would have to have a heart of stone not to scoff. My poem, by the way, was “The Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The days when schoolchildren were required to memorize long passages from Romantic and Victorian poetry are, alas, over.
My dorm mate’s book only sold 11 copies before the prize announcement. But most books of poetry by leading poets, with scant exceptions, sell fewer than 100 copies. A few might know the name of today’s biggest seller, Billy Collins, whom some compare to Rod McKuen, the best-selling poet of the late 1960s. Sure, there is at least one young contemporary poet, Amanda Gorman, whose name the educated public might recognize, along with such stalwarts as Maya Angelou, John Ashbery and John Betjeman.
His book sold, according to the last count that I saw, 353 copies. A freshman dorm mate won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry nearly a decade ago.
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