What I mean by the estate of poetry is something simpler: the actual response of a community to the poetry that is written for it; the effective range and influence of poetry. That, as we all know, has greatly shrunk in the last two centuries, and shrunk alarmingly in the century we live in. At present, poetry is neglected in all civilized countries, and it appears to be declining even in what we call uncivilized ones. Poets and lovers of poetry are worried by this, and have been for several decades; and by now their worry has become as settled condition to be accepted with resignation. Sometimes poets are visited by a horrified surprise at the realization that things should be as bad as they are; that this audience has melted away. And for the audience there seems to have been substituted an alarming, vast, shapeless something, deaf and blind to a once recognized and accepted part of life, and a human inheritance. That something is called the public, and it is quite unworried, does not know what it has lost, and goes its way.
Now that we buy in shops shoulders of beef, loaves, chairs, beds, pots and pans, automobiles, and refrigerators, almost everything that has become necessary or convenient for us, we are eased of a great deal of labor, and have lost touch with a world of experience…The finished article is finished in a final sense; sometimes we can admire its functional beauty, but it is impervious to the imagination. This artificial world which we have made out of the world, the monotony of the work which produces it, the abundance of the distractions which vainly try to make up for that monotony—all these things, it seems to me, help explain the depressed state of poetry, and the present neglect of it.
Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry (1962)
Poetry has been on its last legs for centuries. There's still life in the old girl yet. The micro-presses, POD, and internet and bringing more poetry to people than ever. The demise of poetry has been greatly exaggerated. :)
Posted by: Collin | Jul 20, 2007 at 08:42 PM