Writing Problems: Zombie Poetry!

Every few years, some wiseacre proclaims in an article that “Poetry is Dead.” The most recent proclamation of poetry’s death, “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” was published this week by a conservative critic, Matthew Walther, who thinks T.S. Eliot is still somehow controversial.

Added to which, Eliot was a notorious misogynist and antisemite, two things Walther skips over with his devotion to nonsense. Walther said: “We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so. The culprit is not bad pedagogy or formal experimentation but rather the very conditions of modern life, which have demystified and alienated us from the natural world.”