The state of poetry?

Here are 2 quotes that I think are true of the state of poetry and how we should approach it.

The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by SW Bauer

pp341-342

In 1983, Philip Larkin, reflecting on the growing abstruseness of “academic” poetry, remarked that poets – thanks, in part, to the impossibility of earning any money writing poetry unless they also teach and write about writing poetry – have become critics and professors, and thus pass judgement on poetry as well as writing it. The result is that poetry is in danger of becoming the province of experts: “It is hardly an exaggeration,” Larkin writes, “to say that the poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the classroom, that the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumer’s power to say ‘I don’t like this, bring me something different.’”

p342

In the meantime, the careful reader of poetry should be willing to work hard at understanding poetry: to take it on its own terms, chew it over, reflect on it, and analyze its forms, and then to praise it or to conclude, “This is a disorganized mess” and put the book down.