The well-deserved death of poetry

Why do editors permit such idiocy as this?

Although Plato didn't quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.

That is both cliched and ignorant. Plato may have banned poets in his ideal society, but he did so because the status of Greek poets in reality was very high; he would not have bothered to ban today's poets. Just off the top of my head, poets have been the "most welcome guests at the table of society" in these periods: Greece, 8th century BC - 15th century AD; Rome, 1st century BC - 5th century AD; England, 16th - 19th century. Similar ranges could be produced for Italy, France, Russia, Japan, China, and India, though I would have to look up the dates. The truth is, poets and poetry have been highly welcome "guests at the table of society" in almost every place and time, except for our godforsaken wasteland. What a damned insulting fool Parini is.

Anyone whose world of poetry starts with Shelley and Byron, counts T.S. Eliot highly, and explains itself through Emerson, is himself the best explanation for poetry's death. Parini also quotes from Hopkins exactly the kind of line I despise: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." No-man-fathomed. Parini's supposed lamentation of poetry's decline from popularity is really that disgusting oleaginous genre of self-congratulation that runs, "O! Alas, we are such bold thinkers and so deep, that few can value what we do!"