[W T Clark]

One of the reasons the opening statement to this thread is beneath my contempt is that Eliot's influence on modern verse has now filtered down to a very low base. Sharon Olds, and John Ashbery (to a lesser extent) exert as great if not greater influence on the types of poetry being published now. But the New Formalists, of course, don't read enough poetry to know that. Poetry is neither worse nor better than it ever was. We are not living through a "golden age" of poetry, nor is "poetry dead". It is certainly not on a life-support machine as some on this thread think. As Sturgeon's law makes out: if 90% of it is bad, what matter?! 90% of everything is trash.