I’ve been reading, off and on, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, and it’s made me realize just how trapped we’ve become (me, too) in the structure of the debates over poetry that began with the rise of Modernism. Harrington quotes Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in particular to show that promoters of Modernism sought to exclude “public interest” from poetry and focus instead on “form and style.” Writers like William Rose Benét and all-but-forgotten regional writers like Gene Stratton-Porter bemoaned Modernism’s elitist spurning of the common reader.Read More