It is pretty generally admitted that since the great generation of Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the standard of poetry in the U.S.A. and Great Britain has been steadily “going down.” It’s true that these poets were all falling over themselves to be “modern”—at least in their earlier work—but all or most of them may be seen in retrospect to have been deeply imbued with the classical world picture, Christian theology, and the mythologies of the traditional literatures. Today, when a literary education (of a sort) is open to almost any reasonably bright student in the U.S.A. or even Western Europe, the situation in the colleges and universities has altered enormously and the scope of the courses offered is fundamentally different. The class structure of the Arts student is no longer that of upper middle class boys and girls but a cross-section of all.
Belles Lettres, that upper class phenomenon, has been replaced by something nearer the German philological training (though happily much diluted), and “creative writing” has emerged as a new genre only to merge again almost as precipitately with commercial writing, journalism, and mass communication. The Mandarin style is no longer taught or even prized, and indeed the barbarous styles of the Beats appeal far more widely to the young, not to mention a significantly large proportion of the more starry-eyed professors. Modernity for modernity’s sake has likewise fused with the slicker new techniques of communication, and the old criteria of “good taste” are presently very widely held in disrepute.
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