![]() John Moncure March is another poet my professor might deem as forgotten and unworthy of reinvigoration. ![]() Ward notes: “The stock market rises and falls, but poets who are forgotten rarely rise again even in the rare book catalogs and used book stalls, Lindsay is not seen much these days.” ![]() My professor adopted this market-based image from an article by John Chapman Ward about Vachel Lindsay, once a “giant of the New Poetry,” and now somewhat akin to Enron in terms of visibility on the Dow Jones of poets. Other poets, alas, would rise and fall depending on how scholars interpreted their validity with regard to the current zeitgeist, or how willing publishers were to issue new editions of their works. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound represented solid blue-chip stocks whose names would appear forever on syllabi throughout academia, much like Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsburg from the generation that followed. ![]() During graduate school, I completed a seminar in twentieth-century poetry in which the professor used the stock market as an extended metaphor for the rise and fall in popularity of the poets we discussed. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |