A recent New York Times article claimed that poetry is “dead.” The argument is not new, but since last month marked the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the modernists thought they would reiterate themselves. “We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so,” wrote the article’s author, Matthew Walther.
Science and technology, Walther argues, have made it impossible to have a holistic relationship with nature. Since “The Waste Land,” poets have only described “the fragmentation of human experience.”
This is, of course, nonsense. Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas wrote inspiring poetry, and Eliot’s later “Four Quartets” is, in my opinion, a much better poem than “The Waste Land.” Speaking from experience, I can testify that formal poetry is undergoing a revival today. Thanks to the internet, its practitioners have circumvented gatekeepers in academia and legacy media to bring average people the kind of poetry they like to read. At the forefront of this movement, the Society of Classical Poets is promoting new, original works, the likes of which have not been seen since the 19th century….