Entry 515 — The Null Zone: Still Dominant
I actually got two-and-a-half brief reviews done yesterday. None even started yet today although it’s a little after three in the afternoon. Forty minutes ago I took two APCs, so maybe I’ll get going now.
I have nothing much to write about today, just some old thoughts about world cultural peaks. I think about them fairly often, mostly when comparing my country against others, with the low evaluation of it of so many liberals in mind. While I do believe America is the greatest nation in the world right now, and has been for over a century, I feel it has only achieved one cultural peak, the period from around 1910 until 1960 in poetry. Well, maybe also a technological one I’d call the Edison Era. Getting back to the poetic period, it required many more people than England from around 1810 until 1840 had when England had its one great period of poetry. (Elizabethan England achieved maximal greatness in the drama, not poetry, in my view.) I don’t know of any other nations’ comparable poetic peaks but I’m not dumb enough to imagine that isn’t almost entirely due to my ignorance.
Actually, I don’t really think of the recent peaking of anglophonic poetry in America as belonging culturally to America, but to the British Empire. In any event, I always wonder in conjunction with my admiration of that period, how my period compares. I don’t think anything much was going on in anglophonic poetry between 1960 and 1990, although the next period of superior poetry was shaping up then. From 1990 til now, anglophonic poetry has been sizzling, I’m sure of that. It’s been at least an orderof magnitude better than the poetry of the preceding 30 years. Whether it has gotten or will get to the level or the early twentieth centure period, I can’t say. Don’t know enough about it, and am too close to it to be as objective as I should be. Certainly its poetry has been by far the most varied, the most valuably varied, poetry ever. If it’s a lesser period, it will be because most of its best poets have been too esoteric. It lacks its Yeatses and Frosts, although I hold Richard Wilbur in high esteem. And the sonnets of Michael Snider. In fact, there are probably many excellent “Frosts” out there I’ve been too busy with my own poetry to know much about. And many of our most unconventional poets have composed first-rate, accessible (or reasonably accessible) conventional poetry, too. The first name that occurs to me is Sheila Murphy. Karl Kempton and Geof Huth, as well. Who knows, too, how “accessible” posterity will find the now seemingly difficult work of others. I must remember to live to the age of 130 to find out.