So apparently this article has been moving around a bit in Facebook groups. The writer is not the first to coin the term ” Poetry is Dead” or for that matter the poetic viewpoint that T.S. Elliot was the game changer. What is your idealism or belief? This is not so much a critique as merely a viewpoint ( *please read first). To me, as a poet his viewpoint is interesting but what he has seriously forgotten is that Elliot wrote Wasteland in a drastically changed world only a few short years after WW1. Hence why the poem & title “The Wasteland”

I see Elliot’s poems as the new siren, the almost near dead, broken muse attempting to somehow comprehend a vast amount of death & destruction in a new world trying to recover 100 years ago. This was the very beginning of our times. A fearful world which now after 2 world wars and the fear of possible nuclear war which we were born into. The old world of our humanity & our full relationship to the natural world disappeared in the fire. The constant is again the word ” Fear” which we still live with in our subconscious every single day. So it is of little imagining as to why we are poets of politics & protest, dark, brooding rebellion and of end times. Eliot was just the first victim grappling with this destitute reaction to a nightmare made reality and its horrors.

Simply put? The event of World War, destruction & the death of thousands was merely a razorblade cutting into the poet’s soul and the realization that we would all never be whole or the same ever again.

We are still broken.

We just don’t realize it.

~ R.M. Engelhardt