Thread: Magnificent Moi
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Unread 12-18-2023, 04:18 PM
Nick McRae Nick McRae is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner View Post
I disagree. The vast majority of the poems in the Greek Anthology are, frankly, mediocre. Ditto for the reams and reams of boring medieval and Renaissance religious stuff, especially in Spanish.

I remember having to slog through certain poems from classical and post-classical authors that drove me to the heretical thought that maybe, just maybe, not enough libraries had burned. That's why the normative time for a PhD in Classics at UC Berkeley (if you don't already have a master's degree) is 14 semesters, while a PhD in English takes 12. Enough classical material survived that PhD candidates are expected to be at least vaguely familiar with all of it.

"99% of everything is crap" still holds, I think, even for the old stuff. Some of it survived not because it was good, but because it was inoffensive enough that censors didn't bother to destroy it (unlike Sappho's work).
That's fair. I wonder if some qualification is needed. By quality maybe we're actually talking about 'passable' poetry, which is hard to produce in it's own right.

And standards are a lot higher these days. You're not going to expect Shakespeare out of the Canadian Haida.

Maybe exceptional poetry is a very best case scenario and most of it falls closer to average or mediocre.
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