No good English poets

[matsunosuperfan]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.
Larkin built his reputation on saying 'the world sucks' 11,345 times, when the main problem was that he lived on a damp island. All his poems have the same structure of saying something seemingly mundane yet profound about how the world is bad, and taking four stanzas in coming to the conclusion that things weren't going to get any better.
His is the template that a lot of modern poets seem to follow. Look at this one, for instance. The lines in green are marvelous, but try saying that in fifty other poems and you're basically just on a whinge fest.

Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass. 
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

What is this nonsense! Absurd claims supported by little more than sophomoric attempts at sounding authoritative. This is an embarrassing mini-screed. I feel like this kind of discourse is the reason "it's not to late to delete this" was invented. 

OK, now that I'm done being absolutely shook by the audacity and hubris of this post, what to say about its claims, which are hardly worth dignifying with a response? Reducing Larkin, one of the best poets of the 20th century, to "saying the world sucks" is the kind of move that would impress some teenagers. Unfortunately for you, I am old now, and know bullshit when I see it. I mean the first three sentences of "Mower" are about as good as you can do it for introducing a scene like this. There's tremendous economy, inviting rhythm, already a sense of impending dread, as befits the subject, and typically for Larkin, sheer revelry in the stubby consonances of plain English speech. You're welcome not to like it - there's plenty of room in the world for bad taste - but if you want to condemn its artistry, have the humility to offer an actual substantive critique. You sound like you think yourself Larkin's equal, or his better; I doubt you are either. 

Someone let me know if I'm not allowed to be this bluntly abrasive here; I tend to get in trouble when people are loudly and aggressively wrong because it offends me on like, a spiritual level.

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I used to like Eliot, but it's hard to buy the argument any more that a rational human being actually believed that the creator of the universe sent his son who is also him and another person, in a universe that's been around for at least 14 billion years, to be killed by a Roman provincial governor as a blood sacrifice for the first homo erectus eating an apple. Yes, yes, all that can be interpreted as literary allegory, but you can't base a faith around that. So all that strutting about in a suit and wearing a hat, taking a cab, smoking a pipe and sounding posh all amounts to nothing.

also what is this edgelord atheist rubbish? I don't believe in a corporeal God or the Christian faith but it's pretty lame and passe to dismiss anyone who does as an idiot. Faith is a weird and foundational element of human life and culture, whether you like it or not, and it's an odd and baffling move to just kind of wave your hand at the idea that "Christianity is stupid" and thus dismiss the entire oeuvre of, again, one of the foremost verse innovators of the 20th century. 

I feel like this is rage bait.