Does Poetry Matter in the 21st Century?

Unlike the novel, which has been wrongly accused of going gently into the good night, poetry has reached its Alexandrine couplet. (For those of you not familiar with the term, it refers to the final rhyming couplet that differs from the meter of the rest of the poem due to its extra syllables. Also, the fact that this explanation had to be made only corroborates this point.)

The key in this debate - is poetry dying? Or is it still a viable art form? - is historical context. Poetry is part of a very oral tradition. The oldest known poem is Beowulf, which is 3200 lines of Old English verse about a warrior-king who kills monsters and dragons. Lots of creation stories are forms of poetry. Many songs, like the Star Spangled Banner that was eventually set to the rhythm of an old drinking song, were originally composed as poetry. The key to the historic success of poetry is the public sphere and the oral tradition.

In previous centuries, the public sphere and private sphere were more distinctly defined. The private sphere was an individual home, whereas the public sphere might have been a theater in ancient Greece or in the time of Shakespeare, or a parlor in France. In the public sphere, artists and poets and writers would unveil their works for an eager audience, and the works would then be discussed for their merits. The key to the success of these works was in fact that very public sphere, and the oral tradition that made such a public sphere possible.

Nowadays, that public sphere is gone. What we have instead are many moving private spheres. Coffeehouses like Starbucks have been cited as the new public spheres, but that argument is patently flawed. Walking into a coffee house, one only sees people drinking coffee or eating cookies by themselves, talking on the phone with a friend, reading the newspaper silently, or listening to an MP3 player. There is no area in which emerging poets and artists and writers can bring their work and show it off and have it discussed as their was before.

As if this wasn't already bad enough, the oral tradition that generations of people have relied on is also rapidly disappearing. It is being supplanted by a new, more visual tradition: a tradition that relies on television and images instead of the act of listening to stories, lectures, or religious indoctrinations.

Many art forms find it difficult to survive, much less thrive, in this sort of visual environment. That is precisely why newspaper and magazine sales have been steadily decreasing, and why book sales are falling. It is only natural that poetry, an art form that relies so heavily on sound in terms of techniques like rhythm, meter, consonance, assonance, etc, is taking the brunt of this transition.

Because of the loss of the public sphere, and the rapid primacy of the visual tradition, poetry as an art form is at its last refrain, and the poem becomes nothing but words on a page, barely worth the paper it's written on.