I was on a train recently reading a book of poems by Carol Rumens when the elderly man sitting across the table said, “Do people still read poetry?” He frowned as though rats had re-infested his basement: my chosen book was so preposterous he couldn’t believe his eyes.
Experiment when you’re next around people who have read Wolf Hall, people who would go to see a play by David Hare or an exhibition of contemporary art. Ask them how recently, if at all, they have read a poem published since the year 2000. They are very likely to agree that they never read contemporary poetry.
Last May, Jeremy Paxman said that poetry was now “conniving at its own irrelevance” because poets were only talking to each other. He was speaking as a judge of the Forward prize for poetry, and poets were outraged – on Facebook many of my poet friends foamed at the mouth. But even speaking to defend poets, Michael Simmons Roberts had to concede that the habit of buying books of poetry has been lost.
This is now such a settled state of affairs that it is hard to remember that it was ever different, that poetry used to occupy a central place in culture. In the 1920s, T S Eliot’s depiction of modern civilisation as a Waste Land influenced everyone with intellectual interests – and in the 1930s, W H Auden’s diagnosis of a sickness at the heart of capitalism came to the lips of many people when they wanted to describe their current cultural condition. Eliot and Auden wrote as the inheritors of a powerful tradition that had lasted for six centuries.
