The New Criterion has had many wonderfully Philistine articles but I think the one by John Derbyshire in its December 2000 issue tops all its previous ones. Derbyshire's statement, "In particular, of course, free verse did not work out very well," will surely become a classic--though, to be fair, one must acknowledge that immediately after making it, he allowed that a few good free verse poems have been written. He, of course, almost certainly knows next to nothing about the scores of first-class poets of the past forty or fifty years for whom conventional free verse is as old-fashioned as rhyme and strict meter, so fails not only to grant how widely free verse has been used to build poems of the highest calibar, but to observe its even greater value as a terrain-clearing step to the syntactical experiments of language-centered poetry, and to the mixing of expressive modalities in visual, sound, mathematical and other kinds of pluraesthetic poetry. Not that he, or anyone associated with The New Criterion, would be capable of appreciating such poetries even if they had taken the trouble to spend any time with them.

Considering what a dolt Derbyshire is, it is not surprising that he confesses himself baffled by what he considers poetry's loss of popularity since Longfellow's day--though he offers a few obtuse opinions about it nonetheless (e.g., "The Modern Movement was all a ghastly mistake"). It's no doubt a waste of time to try to set him straight, but as others besides him will read this, I'll give it a shot. The answer is simple: poetry is no longer as popular as it was in Longfellow's day because newer forms of art can do what it used to do for the aesthetically unsophisticated much better than it could. For instance, (1) still and cinematic photography are its superior at capturing easily-digested moments of beauty in both the natural and man-made world; (2) the novel--and now--the movies and television--easily surpass it in story-telling; (3) television talk-show hosts, news commentators, televangelists and the like are vastly more facile than it in expressing moral dogma capable of being understood by imbeciles; and (4) pop musicians (in particular, rap artists--whose lyrics are memorized as lovingly as any prior poets' texts) outdo it in providing the simple fun of doggerel, sentimentality and plain stupidity.

The few poets who do reach a wide audience do it by expressing some simple human truth that appeals to the masses, but only if they are establishment-aided representatives of a certified victims' group like Rita Dove and Maya Angelou, or celebrities like Jewel, and third-rate. As for second- and first-rate poets, they have no alternative but to compose for people with functioning minds and viscera. Hence, the amount of conventional poetry of daunting complexity, and/or poetry that is innovative in the manner of Cummings or Pound, or of contemporary language-centered and pluraesthetic poetries. And the limited, and quiet, audience. It's as simple as that.