When Poetry Fades

Joseph Bottum on how the state of poetry and poets:

Not just the poets but poetry itself seems to have faded over the last fifty years. A new poem from Auden or Lowell was an event—a public event, an entry in the great dialogue we have about ourselves. Poetry was a player in the public conversation, and, if you were going to be a public intellectual, you had to read contemporary poetry.

That was then. This is now. Even fiction—the fundamental art form of the West for the last three hundred years, the primary device by which we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves—has taken a beating. You don’t have to read either poetry or fiction to participate in the high public discourse of America these days. You’re welcome to have them as hobbies, of course, the way all real readers have hobby reading they do: Napoleonic naval stories, or hard science fiction, or police-procedural mysteries. But along the way, you can’t expect anyone else to have read that stuff. It’s been a long time since anyone was embarrassed at a dinner party by not having read something in the latest issue of Poetry.