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Poetry doesn't matter to most people. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 2lst century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerate analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.(1)____
In the 19th century poets like Scott Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, yet they were cultural heroes as well. (2)____But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps false, that people actually liked poetry.(3)____ It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. (4)____They gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. (5)____ In the sense, music and poetry joined hands.
In the 20th century, something went to amiss.(6)____ Poetry became "difficult". That is, poets began to reflect the complex of modem culture, its fierce disjunctions.(7)____ The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle and T.S. Eliot asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics when even m the early 1900s had become little know.(8)____ To read Pound and Eliot with easy, for Instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry.(9)____ That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past. The same could be said for most readers in the 20th century-or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts.(10)____
