Quote:
Originally Posted by Nick McRae
We only come across great work from the past because there's survivorship bias at play. The only poetry that still exists from prior eras is quality work.
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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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