I wrote this post some time ago and am inspired to publish it now by the experience of being involved in WordPress’s Writing 201 Poetry course, during which I was impressed by the large number and wide range of contributions garnered from around the globe.

When did poetry cease to become mainstream? Was it ever read or written by more than an élite few? Could it really now have become marginal to the point of insignificance, if not extinction? Or has it merely been driven underground?

There was a time, not so long ago, when poetry was part of the mainstream and the lifeblood of society. Until quite recently, no self-respecting middle-class home would have been without books of verse on the shelves and working-class culture was pervaded by popular ditties, whose passage from one generation to the next, in a world with no sound-recording technology, required them to be memorized, improvised on, or written down.

There was a healthy flow back and forth between the erudite and the popular, as the numerous poems attributed to anonymous authors in the early sections of anthologies eloquently attest. It is practically a cliché to note how Shakespeare’s plays were carefully crafted to appeal simultaneously to the various and varying strata of Elizabethan society.

Elitism in poetry, as more broadly in literature, would appear, therefore, to be a relatively recent phenomenon, coinciding ironically with the emergence of a superficially more democratic age, less sharply divided by class. While pre-modern societies were pyramidal in structure, with the masses firmly oppressed at the bottom, the cultural mortar that held them together was more uniform and the layers shaded, both socially and culturally, more subtly and haphazardly into one another.

Modern societies are more likely to take the form of a wedding cake, with clearly distinct tiers, each with its specific ingredients to appeal to the increasingly ingrained tastes of increasingly firmly entrenched tribal groups. In this world of culturally, rather than socially-determined status, social mobility tends to be low, even though, in principle, all citizens have an equal right to cut a slice from whichever tier of the cake they might wish to try.

I think it is fair to say that, in the highly circumscribed world of so-called ‘contemporary poetry,’ verse is published by and for a tiny minority who define themselves and their taste in terms of that world; many, if not most, connected in some way to university departments of English Literature.

In the US, as early as the time of Lowell and Berryman, this was already largely the case, although, different from other parts of the world, US students are still encouraged to write poetry at all levels of the education system.

In the UK, until recently, poetry did still reach out to a wider audience, largely due to the efforts of a still paternalistic mass media. As a result, some of Lowell and Berryman’s contemporaries on the European side of the Atlantic—Betjeman, Larkin, even Auden—managed to garner a broader appeal. The popular appeal of academic poetry probably reached its most recent peak with prurient interest in the Plath/Hughes dyad in the late 1960s and thereafter, though more have probably read the biographies and the gossip than the poems themselves.

On the Celtic fringe of the United Kingdom and its former colonies and ghettoes in the US, poetry continued to thrive in this period through its association with nationalist movements and the long overdue promotion of diversity. It is debatable however whether many or most of these poems will survive beyond their immediate historical setting, except in libraries and university lectures.

Few mainstream anthologies include any poets born after 1964 and precious few born after 1945; poetry competitions are routinely won by academics who imitate long out-dated styles and the very idea of poetry is enough to evoke an impression of stuffiness, elitism and class oppression and a yawn of passive-aggressive indignation in perhaps most of the population of the contemporary world.

But it is not true that poetry in general has declined. In fact, with the possible exception of a personal diary, poetry is probably the medium of written expression that ordinary people are most likely to engage in, be it as a counterpoint to the drudgery of their everyday lives or as a response to events by which they are emotionally overwhelmed. Their work tends to be sporadic, often secret, and when one of these amateur poets is ‘discovered,’ their verses are more likely to be turned into pop-songs than printed in a slim book.

I am not interested here in judging the merit of this work or arguing as to which criteria should be applied to assess it, but merely in its extent, as a pool from which, in the future, a new, more genuinely democratic, canon might be drawn.

This has happened before in other fields—the rediscovery of the Blues in the 1960s, for example—and it is in fact more likely to occur now that so-called amateurs have the option of publishing their work, however precariously, online, rather than stuffing hand-written manuscripts away in a drawer, Emily Dickinson-style.

In fact, this reliance on a largely subterranean aquifer of unexplored talent for continuing innovation has probably been more the norm than the exception throughout history. The cliques and elitism of modern culture—the departments of literature, as if poetry could be fitted into a bureaucratic structure—are a peculiar—and ultimately unnatural and counter-productive—feature of the capitalist system; as are the inverted snobberies and glib philistinism that this engenders in its loudest opponents.

Poetry has always felt ill-at-ease in a market-oriented and elitist system. This is in part because it is practically impossible to make a living, let alone a profit, out of producing intangible small artifacts at an infrequent rate dependent on a force as fickle as inspiration. The result is that poets are practically forced to be super-specialists or amateurs or both. Super-specialization by its very nature carves out only a minuscule niche market; amateurism is condemned and discouraged by an increasingly bureaucratized, ‘professionalized’ form of capitalism.

My hope is that the Internet is now changing this and that we will soon see a flourishing of innovative, democratic literary production akin to that which occurred in the music industry in the 1960s with the rediscovery of the Blues.