I don't think the average college student today would find Tennyson or Shelley any less opaque than Silliman or Andrews.

***

More "hokum from the last century":

1. The great poets are the alcoholic, suicidal, self-destructive ones: Jarrell, Plath, Thomas, Sexton, Lowell, Berryman, Spicer.

2. The "New Critics" cared about poetic form.

3. William Carlos Williams was an intellectually limited man who really didn't know what he was doing.

4. Henry James made the novel into a "serious" art form.

5. The most interesting work in literature today is being performed by literary theorists like Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, not by poets, novelists, and playwrights.

6. Randall Jarrell is one of the best literary critics of all time.

7. The New Formalism of the 80s was a significant movement.

8. The New Formalism of the 1950s was a significant movement. Hecht and Wilbur are major poets of the century.

9. This is a great time for poetry, there are many major poets alive today, most of whom teach in MFA programs. Norman Dubie is a great poet, for example.

10. "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" is a major poem of our time.

11. Ashbery doesn't have an "ear."

12. Creeley's poetry is "boring."

13. Frank O'Hara just wrote casual poems on his lunch hour; he didn't take poetry that seriously.

14. Kenneth Koch is a comic poet who we don't need to take all that seriously.