What does “pwned” mean?

I bet Toni Morrison had something to do with this.

No, that doesn’t work, either. There’s a lot of non-fiction verse since those guys, good, bad, high art, folk art, all down the line. I’m thinking of a book I had as a kid—“The Americans”—simple biographies of various historical figures, for one (I’m having tip-of-the-tongue syndrome for the name of the poet).

There’s songs like “The Great Mississippi Flood,” “The Princeton Strike of 1923,” and “The Missouri Earthquake,” not to mention a whole raft of murder ballads based on actual events and set to music so pretty you’ll never get the damned things out of your heads. Oh, and “Peg and Awl,” on the one hand, and “Stackalee,” on another (which is actually about real events of great philosophical and political import). These are verses, with metric regularity, end rhyme, and heightened language, so don’t tell me folksongs aren’t poetry.
More tip-of-the-tongue syndrome prevents me from naming or even describing a pile of natural-sciences poetry. And Brecht. He’s got a couple. And Adrienne Rich. She’s got some. And Phillip Levine, he’s got a few. I wish I could remember the natural sciences poems, they were really cool.

Depends on the Greek author. There are plenty of Greeks who are just as untranslatable, and hence unread – e.g. Theocritus.

The decline of the Church, the decline of a certain concept of elite education, and the German and romantic obsession with the Greeks come to mind. Partly, maybe, Latin authors are more dependent on style and turns of a phrase than Greek authors.

I don’t have a lot of insight, certainly not original insight, but the phenomenon is enormous and seldom thought of.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I’m curious if there are other poets in the neo-classical tradition with which Pope and Dryden might be associated who are of more “world-literary” impact. It strikes me that their French analogues, even Racine, might be considered equally provincial, and their German counterparts are pretty minor. Don’t know about Italy, and don’t know Spanish well enough to have an opinion. Maybe Johnson’s two imitations of Horace?

It’s interesting that the canon of Greek prose authors studies in American universities seems to have changed from the time of Calvin Coolidge to our own from Xenophon and Demosthenes to Plato and Thucydides. Maybe if we read more Demosthenes and less Thucydides we would worry more about showing our manhood by paying taxes and less about standing on the table pounding our chests while paraphrasing Corcyra or Melos or Nikias or whatever.

No, someone has a very very dry sense of humor. I did think that line was particularly straight-faced, even for MB.

As for Proust (Proust thread!!), I read the first 2000 or so pages a few years ago (left off in the 4th volume, about when his grandmother dies), and it was tough sledding but totally awesome. Best part: the steeples at Martinville. Wow. Funniest part: the end of the third one, when Charlus is alternating between berating M. for his supposed rudeness, telling him that this makes absolutely impossible any further relations between them, on the one hand, and (when M. tries to take his leave) entreating him to stay a bit longer, have some tea, etc., on the other. Classic.

But actually, the problem would be solved by “rigidly adhering to a canon that refuses to acknowledge anything written after 1940.” As Anderson says in #108, that would mean that the canon would be of a size such that people could read it in a lifetime, and would not grow. The problem is not really that it’s a sin to miss out on reading something good. The problem is that you’re going to die before you have the chance to read everything good. Since there’s not anything you can do about the “you’re going to die” part, the temptation is to redefine the what the “everything good” part means, which is at least theoretically under your control.

My Three Bears meme has gone viral. Yay Emerson.

People only have so many hours in their life. The best case scenario when new authors and works are added to the cannon is that it makes reading liturature a richer, more attractive experience overall, causing people to spend more time reading and less time doing other things. But it can’t be that everyone reads everything they did before, then add Olaudah Equiano and Djuna Barnes and Zora Neale Hurston to their “to-do” list. Instead, they read five works by these authors and don’t get to two works by the white-guy cannon that they would have otherwise.

This is not a bad thing: people are spending more hours reading high-quality stuff and getting a richer experience. In the end “zero-sum is nonsense” is a straw man: you have to admit that people are reading less of the old cannon material as a result of the new additions, even if each addition is not a one-for-one trade.

Well, yes, but no matter how many other things we crowd out, each of us will still never read everything. No doubt it’d be good to try to get people to move more of their free time to literature reading. But that doesn’t really change the nature of the problem at all. If everyone read twice as much, we could have canons that people might actually read that are twice as long. And then people would promptly argue over what to add to the twice-as-long canon.

That problem is not solved by rigidly adhering to a canon that refuses to acknowledge anything written after 1940.

The debate pre-supposes it’s a sin to miss T. S. Eliot for reading Toni Morrison. Why is it not also a sin to miss Toni Morrison for reading T. S. Eliot?