In “The Meaning of Modern Poetry” Jeremy Noel-Tod says: “Contemporary poetry is praised and approved, but rarely loved as much as the other arts.”And posits explanations for this lack.
“The late Adrian Mitchell used to say that ‘most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. But the solution is not to lower the common denominator. The problem with much modern poetry is it plays down what people really like in the arts: mystery and drama.” (Emphasis mine.)
Read the entire article in the Telegraph.co.uk.
And comment if you’d like. (You’ll have to open this post to access the comment feature.) Do you agree with his assessment?
“The problem with much modern poetry is it plays down what people really like in the arts: mystery and drama.”
I think that’s absolutely true, though of course it’s not only poetry that has that problem. One of the reasons I love F&SF as a fiction genre is that it’s full of Yeats’ “far-off suggestion”, which mainstream fiction tends to lack.
“Segregation by identity inevitably favours poems cast in the form of relatively stable monologues”
I hope this is becoming less true as traditional perceptions of race/identity give way to more fluid and mixed understandings. But I also think that “stable monologues” are more likely to be kept around and read in the long term, not because they’re better poetry, but because poems whose meaning depends on the conditions of the moment become less comprehensible once the moment is past.