![]() One would never yoke them to draw plow through field. Usually, however, it is the case that poetry lists are show horses. Today, editors at large houses will sometimes take on books of poetry as auxiliary or personal projects. Only those who could read could also afford to purchase books, a very cozy market if one is willing to tolerate the overbearing moral attention paid to the printed word. Conversely, literacy was confined to a drastically more narrow band of society than it is in the first world today. In that age, a book was a luxury item rather than a disposable airline read or stage of a multifarious marketing plan it cost considerably more, largely due to the binding, and its purchase could be compared roughly to that of a microwave oven or decent futon in our economy. It is true that some of the English Romantic poets (certainly not the lone genius William Blake) made very real fortunes from their books, fortunes that allowed them to enjoy lives of supreme decadence by the standards of most living at the time. ![]() ![]() Whether this was the result or cause of bad behavior was not (and is still not) entirely plain. ![]() Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins.Īmong the many impediments to which contemporary poets much admit, Dana Gioia wrote in his vital essay “Can Poetry Matter?” of notoriously poor sales figures. ![]()
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