How great is your poetry?
Four poets (Thomas Sayers Ellis, Daisy Fried, Adam Kirsh and Jeredith Merrin) discuss greatness. Samples: "I’m glad that our discussion has brought up two poets who usefully test what we mean by greatness, Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop. I would agree with Jeredith that there is something not quite right about calling them great, in the sense that Eliot and Whitman and Dickinson are great. And the reluctance to make that distinction, motivated though it may be by virtuous political or personal reasons, seems to me a mistake. There's a hierarchy of achievement in poetry, as in all the arts; denying it doesn’t make it disappear, it only blunts and veils our aesthetic responses."
"Puffery and careerism aren’t 20th century inventions; bad poetry doesn’t chase out good. If it did, poetry would have died long ago. Possibly, good poetry needs bad poetry in order to exist."
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