Poetry is the oldest branch of literature, predating the invention of writing. Increasingly, it appears to be the most neglected literary art form as well. Most book stores stock only a couple of shelves of poetry, mostly anthologies and the classics. This may be due to a gradual trend in Western civilization from an oral to a written society. In oral societies where history is remembered by bards rather than written by historians, the careful construction of lines and the use of meter and rhyme are important mnemonic techniques. In the 20th century English poetry more or less abandoned this model, and most contemporary poems read like intensely-written prose vignettes with line breaks. This brand of verse is not well received, at least compared with genre novels. Which begs the question--is poetry's unpopularity due to the readers or the poets? Why do Byron, Milton, T.S. Eliot and the other dead poets sell, but not Charles Simic or Donald Hall?
In an attempt to answer these questions, Whistling Shade conducted its first annual poetry survey. We had about fifty respondents, each of whom rated five poems with scores from 1 to 10 (10 being highest). There were twenty poems included in the survey in all, chosen from classic and contemporary poets. Because we did not want the subjects to be biased or familiar with any of the poems, we selected only more obscure pieces from well known poets like Frost or Yeats, and did not include the author with the poem. The majority of the respondents read very little poetry on a regular basis.
Interestingly, the results did not emphatically embrace either the "old style" poetry of meter and rhyme or the newer free verse style. Though Byron topped the list with his poem to a skull cup (which, by the way, he really did own!) contemporary poet Mary Oliver was not far behind. William Wordsworth and Anne Sexton had the same average score, and Yeats and Frost did just a little better than Rita Dove. Surprisingly, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg scored near the bottom, as did William Carlos Williams and Dylan Thomas. All are popular "hip" poets who pushed the envelope, and the responses for them were very up and down, with some 7, 8 and 9 scores and quite a few 1s and 2s. Frost's "Two Tramps in Mud Time", on the other hand, consistently scored between 5 and 7.
Just to mix it up a little, and, okay, out of sheer vanity, we included one Whistling Shade poem in the survey, "Why She Likes It" by Amber Shields (Summer 2003). Interestingly, this poem by an obscure local author ranked 4th in the field of 20. Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, was the number of respondents who said they wrote their own poetry--about 60%.
Next year we hope to build on this data with another survey and more respondents.