Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner
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).
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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.