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By Christopher Clausen

Because the finish of the eighteenth century, Christopher Clausen asserts, poetry has progressively declined in cultural prestige within the English-speaking international, yielding its former position as a bearer of fact to the advancing sciences. because the place of poetry used to be a growing number of threatened, its defenders made ever greater claims for its value, even holding for a time that it will take where of faith. yet, although the Romantics caused a sustained revival of great poetry for a vast viewers, the viewers started to dwindle towards the top of the 19th century, and the decline sped up because the 20th century advanced.

Though a few of the cultural adjustments chargeable for this retreat have been past the regulate of poets―"a society within which many of us locate their leader safety and feel of that means during the ownership of convinced gadgets will produce nice ads, no longer nice poetry"―Clausen reveals during this state of affairs facts of an abdication between artists. simply because modernist poets and their successors deserted a few integral ideas, he believes, critical modern poetry now has nearly no viewers outdoor of English departments. but the necessity for poetry "is no longer much less in an period like ours," and "the possibilities that the top of the 20 th century deals to poetry won't develop into totally obvious until and until eventually poets benefit from them."

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Even as it did so, however, the audience for poetry was on the verge of becoming both smaller and less serious, as Peacock had predicted. Despite the eminence of Tennyson, Browning, and Longfellow throughout the later nineteenth century, poets were no longer the culturally central figures they had once been; instead of honored prophets, they were on their way to becoming something less than entertainers. TWO Poetry as Revelation "Well, I sort of made it up," said Pooh. "It isn't Brain," he went on humbly, "because You Know Why ...

At times, even the later Arnold felt that the "something," however indefinite, was really there; but frequently, in James Benziger's words, "he was an idealist by default only; to be anything else would to him have been intolerable. " 8 That the great exemplar of poetic revelation in recent times had been Wordsworth, who was himself so uncertain-even "Tintern Abbey" implies that he found the world "unintelligible" except in rare moments-reinforced Arnold's tendency toward vagueness on the crucial question of just what poetry could reveal to us about reality.

1 Even though Wordsworth shrank from fully identifying poetry with religion, his works were the sacred scriptures of those nineteenth-century readers who put their faith in poetic revelation. Because the religion that had hitherto provided Western civilization with its most fundamental values and view of the world was now faltering under the blows of science and philosophy, poetry would step into its place. Now the poet could truly be a prophet to his civilization; his works would be the new Word, subordinate to no higher authority.

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