Because I'd like to see Barbara's questions get answered as she asked them, I'll try to tackle at least one, and perhaps I'll be able to tie it into the specific discussion of the poem above.
Barb asks, among other things:
Quote:
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Tim and John said that these days the ordinary reader has a degree in creative writing and has read lots of modern poetry. Do you all agree with that? Do you imagine your readers as highly educated in modern poetry?
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I'd answer: Not all of them, but quite a few of them. The typical Spherean who's submitting poems to magazines is submitting to poetry magazines more often than to general interest magazines, because there are more slots for poems in poetry magazines. Those magazines are read primarily by other poets, and those readers have made a study of contemporary poetry even if they don't have MFAs.
Was this true for Wilbur when he wrote "Thyme Flowering Among Rocks"? The poem (I'm guessing here) was probably published individually before the book in which it appeared, which I think was
The Beautiful Changes, out in 1947 [editing back in: Nope, I was wrong; it's from
Walking to Sleep, a much later book]. At midcentury, general magazines still did publish quite a bit of poetry, not all of it meant to appeal to the most highbrow audiences. (See, for example, Phyllis McGinley and Elizabeth McFarland and the awful brouhaha about Anne Morrow Lindbergh's first book of poetry.) My searches turn up "Thyme" in
The New Yorker; perhaps it was first published there--can anybody verify that? [
The New Yorker issue date is 1986, as it turns out.] That would suggest that the poem was felt to have both broad appeal and enough subtext to stand up to scrutiny from expert readers.
(I see I've cross-posted with Tim. I'm going to avoid the issue of whether MFA programs should exist or not, since they do, and simply end on the note that nowadays we have to assume the audience knows something about poetry.)