There will probably always be a conflict between obscurantism and populism in American poetry. The more obscure poets can in some cases claim inheritance from modernism. Their poems are toppled columns of a former empire. More reader-friendly poetry has a long tradition in the twentieth century that continued unabated directly beneath the grand experiments of modernism. There are those who still prefer the poetry of Rudyard Kipling to anything written after. If poetry has fallen out of favor with the general public, at least to the extent that it held with poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson or Walt Whitman, it is generally because of its purported difficulty. “I don’t get poetry” is a refrain often asserted even by avid readers. In the conflict between obscurantism and populism, populism would seem the way to the hearts of the many.

ERNEST HILBERT:  Contemporary Poetry Review