[David Danoff]

Typical for Logan (and I'm generally a fan), a lot of hyperbole that seems to be intended mostly for comic purposes.

I can't say if I agree or disagree, since his "argument" seems more or less self-canceling. He appears to be saying both that it doesn't really matter if poetry stays a minority, elite art, which is what it's always been...but also that school children should be frog-marched through Dante, Catullus, Anne Carson, et al., and what a wonderful world that would yield. (And also: somersaults and lizards.)

I come away concluding: he's mostly just having fun here, playing with contrasting ideas and showing off his wit. There's not much in the way of opinion in this opinion piece.

[Allen Tice]

NOT Anne Carson (or a lot of her).

[Ed Shacklee]

And the age ended, and the last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of the giant’s enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk acrosss the lawn outside.

They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath;
The kobold’s knocking in the mountain petered out.

Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad,
And the pert retinue of from the magician’s house
Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanquished powers
XXXwere glad

To be invisible and free: without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed into their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.

XXX- W. H. Auden, In Time of War (XII)

[John Whitworth]

You can live a full life without a scrap of poetry. A full life? Full of what?