I’m so tired of reading lists of poetry collections purported to be superior and finding nothing written about the collections except descriptions of their subject matter (and their author’s slant on life, if that’s not subject matter, as well).
I’m in the middle of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (his intended version, not the one originally published). I’d never read anything of his before although I have from time to time read, and enjoyed, others’ westerns. It seems a better book to me than anything nobelist Steinbeck ever wrote.
I’m not happy to say this because it could well indicate I’m out of it in some serious way, but there is no mainstream poet whose just-published collection I’d be eager or even interested in reading. That’s because none of them makes me wonder excitedly what new things they might have done now. I do read mainstream poetry, although not nearly as much as I read escapist literature, both fiction and non-fiction (e.g., science for the layman), but it’s mainstream poetry from decades ago.
A wack and I argue nature/nurture from time to time. He believes Oxford was born at just the right time in just the right circumstances to have been nurtured into The World’s Greatest Poet whereas I believe he had the right genes to become one of the world’s greatest poets. Anyway, he argues that if I’m right there should be many Shakespeares around today considering how many more people are alive than were when he was. I believe there are, but how would one recognize them? Fascinating topic with a huge number of variables and difficult questions. One big variable for me is the effect of over-population on the recognition by society of it. Obviously a Shakespeare will stand out more in a world with only a few geniuses spread out in it than in one like ours where a city like New York may have twenty of them active in the same square mile.
A huge problem is the apples/oranges one: how do you compare Beethoven, Darwin, Klee and Shakespeare with one another. Or even someone like Aristophanes with Shakespeare? The former’s plays were not nearly as complex and rich as Shakespeare’s but that doesn’t mean he was not Shakespeare’s equal as a playwright any more than Archimedes must have been a lesser scientist than Newton because his discoveries were less sophisticated than Newton’s.
What would a present-day Darwin do in biology? He can’t achieve any large thing the size of what Darwin did, because there is only one main idea in biology, natural selection, and Darwin was first to it. But why can’t lower-level discoveries not take as much genius to arrive at than Darwin’s?
I think many filmed histories superior by far to any of Shakespeare’s histories. David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, for instance. Shakespeare’s verbal diction is superior to Lean’s but Lean makes up for it with his photography.
I think Shaw’s Saint Joan superior to any of Shakespeare’s histories. His Caesar and Cleopatra may be, too.
A metaphysical thought I’ve always half-believed in is that there are only so many Shakespeare-level urwarenesses in existence, an urwareness being a person’s ultimate self and different from anyone else’s and (perhaps) responsible for what adheres to it to form the body (and brain) it will have as a human being. If there are only a dozen or so Shakespeare-level urwarenesses in existence, then it won’t matter how large the global population becomes, there will never be more than a dozen or so super-geniuses around.
Robert Crumb may be one of them. I bring him up because I consider artists in his field possibly the most stupidly under-rated artists there are, and he seems to me tops in his field. I believe his superior is bound eventually to appear–one who adds what Pollock had and brilliance as a poet to what Crumb has. And is better than Crumb at what I consider major plots, Crumb being a sort of short-story writer.
