I may regret speaking up here, but I feel compelled.
On the acknowledgment pages of my books, I always thank the poets of Eratosphere. But what I'm most grateful for has never been critique per se, but encouragement and, most of all, general poetic education.
When I came back to writing poetry after a long time away, I knew a lot about really old poetry (being a medievalist), but so little about anything after the Modernists that I was actually unaware of Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, just to name a couple of examples. The Sphere corrected that.
The many threads on the Masters board that ask for favorite seasonal poems, favorite short poems, favorites on this or that theme, discussions of particular meters and particular forms--all those were tremendously valuable. And they're still there, so they still are.
The intense and sometimes distressing arguments, political or poetic, that sometimes drove people away were far less important in the long term than the sharing of great poems.
So was there a golden age? I can't say. I only know that being here a lot between 2006 and 2011 meant everything to my writing.
My two cents.
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