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In line with his discussion of Edgar Guest under way in his
current column in Slate, Robert Pinsky asked the question about who we think among currently popular poets might suffer a similar
diminishment in estimation , say, forty
years from now. It would be a long list, but some things have to gotten to
first off, pronto.
There remains a respectful silence on the matter of quality,
but I think in a few years readers of poetry will gain enough spine and admit
that the poems of the late and truly tragic Mattie Stepaneck were spectacularly
wretched. I well understand a dying young man's desire to remain optimistic and
strong and courageous and to show all this is some painfully earnest poems of
faith, sunshine, flowers, spiriituality and such, but Stepaneck's fatal malaise
made him immune to criticism.
The media, with its instincts for human interest stories
that can be exploited indefinitely, turned the boy into a poster child for All
Our Lost Innocence, and made it possible for the woefully amateurish and
sub-literate cracker barrelisms of his poems to be published and become best
sellers.
There was stony
silence as to how dreadful the work was; no one said a thing. You bit your
tongue and didn't argue the idea that Stepaneck's popularity would fade soon
after he passed away. No one wanted to be accused of saying mean things about
the poems of a young boy dying from a fatal condition.
Still, someone with no
dog in the fight , with no emotional ties to the increasingly distant
recollection of Stepaneck and the context of his verse, will come across his
collected poems and become numb with incomprehension as to why anyone, anyone
at all thought that such a specimen of slithering sentimentalism qualified as
something worth publishing. The future
critics of poetry will regard poetry fans of this day, as we regard poetry
readers of Edgar Guest, as rubes for making the relentlessly mundane a
highlight of our aesthetic experience.
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