Who Killed Poetry?

 Joseph Epstein- Who Killed Poetry?

I was glad, as so often, to pick up a tip from the internet's foremost literary website, Anecdotal Evidence, and print myself off a copy of this essay.

From 1988, its content doesn't look very original by now but 36 years ago perhaps it was.

In fact, the British and Irish poetry of the 1990's was fine by me. It didn't seem all over to me at all. I was keen, I was active, I wanted to know and I was trying my best. But such attitudes as those of Joseph Epstein, me then and anybody else who proclaims the demise of a whole genre, depends on how old you are, what one was brought up with and admired and the almost inevitable consequence that what follows it won't live up to the wonder of one's first discoveries and infatuations.

The pop charts never regained the glories of September 1971 for me although it was a long time before they became not even worth knowing about. While I have favourite poets that were born later than me, most of them aren't and it's hard to think of many whose work I'm infatuated with that are more than ten years my junior.

There will, for later generations, be poets, pop artists and all sorts regarded as greater genuises than David Bowie but they won't be able to explain Taylor Swift to me.

Joseph Epstein was born in 1937 and so I can see why he lost his faith before I did. He is a generation older than me but the same thing happened to him except with reference to the poets of a generation earlier.

Who Killed Poetry? looks like a commonplace complaint by now, wondering where are the 'great', 'memorable' poets that there once were, blaming it on 'professionalism', on the proliferation of creative writing degree courses that the UK took in from the USA by osmosis, the inward-looking nature of such an industry and how, because I've been told it's true, graduates from creative writing courses go on to teach creative writing on further such courses. Perhaps one benefit of the collapse of the Blair initiative to have 50% of the population go to university might be that such vague qualifications won't be worth the debt the graduate emerges with and nobody will apply for them.

It happened a long time before that, though, that poetry lost its position as having the same sort of national significance as the test match, the pop charts or Strictly Come Dancing but everything has its day. Simon Armitage is a nice lad doing a fair enough job but it's not his fault he's not the household name that Alfred Tennyson was in his day.

Not all that many people are actually all that bothered about poems these days and it is a downward spiral when not even I am. I didn't mind it being an exclusive club - even a bit elitist if it had to be- while it seemed important to me but it's less and less so and more and more retro.

I'm not taking Joseph Epstein's canon of great poets as mine, we all have our own. And it's hardly likely that we were unlucky enough to be living when all art became moribund and worthless. Yes, the whole universe is said to be ultimately due to become lifeless and sterile once every star has burnt itself out. I can't see there being further Bachs, Beethovens or Mozarts; I don't foresee future poems or painting improving on what's been done but for whatever time is left to our species they will convince themselves they are thrilled with what they are provided with, our stuff will seem hilariously dated, and they will be trapped in exactly the same cage that time puts us in as what we are.