As a reader and writer of poems, it’s difficult not to feel like a member of an endangered species– and even more difficult, perhaps, to remember it hasn’t always been this way.  I started Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey while bored in Massachusetts, and laughed out loud on reading this:

“[T]hey were still resolute in meeting, in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together.  Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies to bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up with a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.  Alas! if the heroine of one novel not be patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?   I cannot approve of it.  Let us leave to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another: we are an injured body.”

Poor Austen.  She was double damned– a woman in a male-dominated profession and sad step-cousin to the good old boys of poetry who made the new so-called “novels” look so shoddy.  Sure, Northanger Abbey is a send-up of the crappy Gothic novel, but I can’t help but hear the author grinding her teeth.

How things have changed!  Sometimes, it seems we’re living in a novelists’ world (Novelists: wouldn’t you love to have us think this is true?) and good old Dryden and Pope don’t have the cachet they once had.  Is poetry the new “injured body?”

Don’t answer that.