|
29 October 2004. I posted a copy of my blog entry for yesterday at New-Poetry, and got responses from only two people, both of them flippantly satirical about the value of trying to figure out whether a given poet is major or not. So I then asked the group, "Won't any of you chip in some thoughts about how you would decide whether Hecht or anyone else is a major poet or not? Or poet who will likely be taken very seriously a hundred years from now if you don't like the term, 'major poet?'"
The anti-rationalist, Halvard Johnson, predictably wrote back, "As for me, I'll just wait and see."
"No, you won't (I don't think)," I replied. "You'll distinguish major from minor and minor from so-so and so-so from not worth reading, right now, and prefer the first to the others.
"But [by not making known the reasoning for your categorization,] you'll be shirking your responsibility to posterity to argue for the first against the ones people like me are arguing for, so there's a chance posterity will be stuck with mine since loudness tends to sway the academics who choose the contents of anthologies and textbooks more than silence."
I just now added the part in brackets for clarification. The preceding observations aren't of first importance, but are yet of some importance, I think. So I'll probably return to them.
|
|