November 2, 2023

The Alarming Spread of Poetry



P.G. Wodehouse is Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (1881 – 1975) and he was an English author and one of the most widely-read humorists of the 20th century. wrote "The Alarming Spread of Poetry."  Do you think he was being sarcastic?
To the thinking man, there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets. In the good old days, poets were for the most part confined to garrets, which they left only for the purpose of being ejected from the offices of magazines and papers to which they attempted to sell their wares. Nobody ever thought of reading a book of poems unless accompanied by a guarantee from the publisher that the author had been dead at least a hundred years. Poetry, like wine, certain brands of cheese, and public buildings, was rightly considered to improve with age; and no connoisseur could have dreamed of filling himself with raw, indigestible verse, warm from the maker.

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