No good English poets

[busker]

While I disagree with the premise of the original post on an intuitive level, I can't quite refute it, simply because I'm not so well read. Of the artists post-Shakespeare typically cited to be his equals, I've not read enough of one (Milton), and don't really grok the two others (the proportion of bad to good in Wordsworth is worse than that of Shakespeare, while Blake is too unpolished for me).

That said, I similarly disagree with the replies that we should somehow separate the art from the artist. Part of the satisfaction we get from a piece of work, whether we acknowledge it or not, is *moral*---we like transgressive art because it transgresses boundaries we acknowledge to be stupid, we dislike art that says nothing because it is morally banal, and so on---but also failures in politics can represent some very particular failures in aesthetics. An artist with bad politics suffers from two things, either a failure of imagination or a lack of self consistency, both of which are deadly to poetry, however stunning an individual piece may seem. Eliot isn't great precisely because he's so antisemitic, misogynistic, and altogether ur-fascist in his maturity: when your poetry tackles alienation under modernity and provides as a solution the Christian faith, but you alternately support systems so fundamentally modern and anti-Christian, to the point of inserting a few telling canards in some of your more obscure works, then your poetry utterly fails as an argument.

Of course, I'm not sure this perspective entirely agrees with the original post, either. For one, what's so special about *English* poetry that it has failed post-Shakespeare? Is it because, after Shakespeare, colonialism and capitalism reared their ugly heads, forever tainting most artists that worked under their shadow? In which case, the argument shouldn't be restricted to English poetry. Is it because the English language gestated in the unique soup of systems that ultimately gave birth to capitalism? In which case, Shakespeare, who wrote six hundred years after the Norman conquest, should be considered an anomaly, not the norm.

For another, you can't decry Tennyson and Hitler as decent to good craftsmen but thoroughgoing racists then lump the Irish in with the English. Like Eliot, that's just damningly self-inconsistent.

And my favourite Euphoria character is Jules, though I hear the show stopped doing her justice after season one.

This is a marvellously well thought through reply. Thanks for taking the time to write it out.
50% of the value of this site lies in such reflections