Despite noises to the contrary, poetry is doing just fine in the 21st century, and by all lights, it should continue to do well into the far distance future.
The noises to the contrary
- “Don't these critics and poets realize that their art form is dead?” —Bruce Wexler, Newsweek May 5, 2003
- “Popular poetry is dead, dead, dead.” —John Derbyshire, National Review Online, August 30, 2006
- “. . . the sad fact is that poetry, as anything other than a private concern, or a parlour game between a closed circle of devotees, is a thing long gone.” —Alexander G. Rubio, Bits of News, February 13, 2007
- "You may have noticed that poetry is dead. The obituary has already been written.” —Quotation of Martin Amis in The Guardian, June 9, 2007
Voices are raised periodically, announcing the death of poetry. However, poetry is not dead. Poetry is as vibrant and vital as it has ever been. In fact, poetry cannot die; it is an integral part of art and language.
Where poetry lives
Poetry lives first of all in the hearts, minds, and souls of all people. For the doomsayers and poetry-obituary writers like those above, poetry may, in fact, be dead. Wexler, for example, claims that with his busy life of career and mortgage payments, he lost interest in poetry, even after being quite an aficionado in college and even after writing poetry. So what? That he lost interest in poetry doesn’t mean everyone has. Such is truly a warped logic.
Movies are probably the most popular artistic medium that attracts the largest number of people, and movies often quote poems or stanzas from poems, which send people searching for poem and poet. Recent examples are Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which Auden’s “Funeral Blues” is recited.
Actually, between 1946 and 2004, no fewer than 93 poets from Joseph Addison to W. B. Yeats have poems represented in movies, and many of the poets have more than one poem represented. Auden, for example, has three poems in three different movies, William Blake has ten poems in nearly twenty movies, and W. B. Yeats has eight.
The nature of poetry
Poetry has always been a quiet and shy art. Novels are more boisterous, songs and plays more tumultuous still. Paintings are more spread throughout the landscape than poems are. Any art form from architecture to sculpture to Zen gardening will attract more people than poetry. The nature of poetry dictates its popularity. But popularity does dictate the vitality of poetry.
Poetry lives in small spaces. Even performance poetry, slam poetry, and especially sedate poetry readings attract far smaller audiences than rock concerts, dance recitals, and gallery openings for individual painters.
But many books of poetry are published every year. Many poetry readings are conducted. Many web sites are devoted to poetry. Place the word “poetry” in the Yahoo! search engine and you get 205,000,000 entries! In Google, 170,000,000 entries!
Ruth Lilly
If poetry is dead, someone should tell Ruth Lilly, heiress to the Lilly fortune, who gave Poetry Magazine $100,000,000 back in 2002. According to Joseph Parisi, the magazine’s editor from 1983-2003, that bequest guarantees the magazine’s existence “into perpetuity.”
So even if poetry should die some time in the future, the magazine named for its sake will not.
