No sooner had I finished Dana Gioia’s essay "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print" (The Hudson Review, Volume LVI, Number 1) than I had a vision. As with many visions, its meaning was not immediately clear. I saw the Lincoln Cathedral a-sea, the "sovereign hill" on which it stands submerged, the Atlantic Ocean lapping its towers, its barely visible turrets and spires resembling the sharp but increasingly mist-obscured outlines of a high atoll.

It took me some time to understand this vision and its connection to Gioia’s essay, but gradually the metaphor revealed itself: Lincoln Cathedral has certain unique features, and these features have clear (if one can avoid the fog) analogues to poetry. Where the sea comes in, I will explain in time.

The construction of Lincoln Cathedral was undertaken just six years after William the Conqueror was crowned King of England on Christmas day, 1066. Those were auspicious years for the new "English" monarchy, for Christianity, and for poetry: for it was around this time that Bishop Leofric presented the englisc boc (believed to be the Exeter manuscript, perhaps the earliest surviving book of Anglo-Saxon verse) to Exeter Cathedral. Leofric died the year of Lincoln Cathedral’s conception; therefore by no later than 1072, England had her last successful invasion, a new monarchy, the groundbreaking of what was to become the highest building in Europe, and the foundation of a new literature.

In his essay, Gioia says "print has lost its primacy in communication." While this may be true, we must not forget that print is primarily a way of preserving communication, and now there are many newfangled ways of preserving communication: magnetic media, electromagnetic media, optical media, and any number of other just-invented-but-probably-already-obsolete storage technologies. A millennium ago, options were more limited, and without the Exeter manuscript, we might not have this stunning anonymous poem (translation by Michael Alexander):

Wulf and Eadwacer

The men of my tribe would treat him as game:
if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright.

Our fate is forked.

Wulf is on one island, I on another.
Mine is a fastness: the fens girdle it
and it is defended by the fiercest men.
If he comes to the camp they will kill him for sure.

Our fate is forked.

It was rainy weather, and I wept by the hearth, thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings;
one of the captains caught me in his arms.
it gladdened me then, but it grieved me too.

Wulf, my Wulf, it was wanting you
that made me sick, your seldom coming,
the hollowness at heart; not the hunger I spoke of.

Do you hear, Eadwacer? Our whelp
Wulf shall take to the wood.
What was never bound is broken easily,
Our song together.

The preservation of such a magnificent poem is of primary importance, the method of its preservation of relativity minor significance. For all I care, the poem might have been inscribed on a copper scroll, chiseled in stone, or memorized word for word and kept alive by successive generations of Druids or Knights Templar. What is important to me is that today I can go to Google, type in "Wulf and Eadwacer" and instantly view the original text, its history, numerous scholarly and duncely commentaries, and translations ranging from excellent to stultifying. But I can find the poem, and I can read it. Without the poem, its histories and commentaries would be far less meaningful. For instance, it would be a bad idea to read Harold Bloom’s The Book of J or Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human without reading the Bible and Shakespeare first.

Lincoln Cathedral was built to last, largely of nearly indestructible oolite limestone. Early English poets worked in words of similar solidity and durability. Reading "Wulf and Eadwacer," I am struck by the raw emotion of the words, but also by their lastingness, nay!, their everlastingness. But in those sections of Lincoln Cathedral where softer Purbeck marble was used, the predictable, inevitable decay has occurred. Purbeck marble was quarried by the Romans during their occupation of Britain. Many modern poems, with their soft Latinate flourishes and facades, and their endless fascination with things obscurely Greek, seem to have a similar vanishing property. While Gioia rightly points out the decline of the modern printed poem, I wonder if he thinks "Wulf and Eadwacer," "Beowulf," "The Canterbury Tales," "They Flee from Me," or any of Shakespeare’s best sonnets will exhibit similar decay. Surely not. And so I consequently wonder if the problems of modern poetry are not primarily a matter of poor materials and shoddy construction. Poems are not the only modern things not built to last. Lincoln Cathedral stood a thousand years, and still stands today. How long will our hastily-constructed Starbucks, ensconced in their strip malls, last?

Walter Savage Landor saw John Milton's work as a stone arch compared to the ephemeral rainbows of other poets, and one can easily find a similar contrast today by comparing the bedrock work of Robert Frost to the giddy vapors of theoretically "major" poets esteemed solely by critics esteemed solely by you-know-who. A snowball can accumulate mass rather spectacularly while tumbling downhill, but when it reaches the bottom, its "growth spurt" ends, abruptly. Even so with the spectacular decline of modern poetry: now the sun is out and everyone wants to avoid the sodden, soggy mess. But surely it is wrong to lump all poets and poems into a messy generalized affair called "poetry." Poets like Wyatt, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Frost are not (and will never be) lumped into the downfallen lump of poetic ineptitude that, quite rightly, readers skirt as mudpuddles and quagmires today. After a thousand years, we are still reading and thrilling to "Wulf and Eadwacer." A thousand years from now, I believe readers will be reading and thrilling to poems by Frost, Eliot, Auden, Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Dylan Thomas, all of whom wrote within the last forty- odd years. There is not so much a dearth of good poets today as a superfluity of bad poets. But that is true of any forty year period of time since the first caveman eyed the moon and grunted rhythmically, trying to impress a prospective mate.

Of course, having good poets doesn’t help much if we have bad readership, and Gioia correctly points out that American illiteracy is on the rise, even as American attention spans constantly and consistently shorten. Things were different when construction of Lincoln Cathedral began. Then, it took hundreds of years to build a cathedral, and if attention spans were longer, lifespans were not. A mason’s grandson might finish the job his father’s father began, and that on a single column. Great works require great faith. But this begs the question: along with bad materials and bad methods of construction, have modern poets also not kept faith with readers? Since the advent of the Surrealists, the Symbolists, the Imagists, the Vorticists, the Projectivists, et al, I would say resoundingly: they have not! Poets appointed themselves gods at whose feet readers should be content to fawn in uncomprehending yet appreciate silence. At which suggestion readers blinked, frowned, shrugged, then walked away. And while it is no doubt true that readers have more options today than in days of yore, and thus read for shorter periods of time, they do read, and the typical short length and compression of the modern lyric poem should benefit from shorter attention spans. Yet readers shun poetry for novels galore. Only if poetry is, in the public’s eye, worse than prose does it make sense that readers in need of Ritalin should prefer novels of hundreds of pages to poems of a few lines.

Gioia indicates that "somewhere around 19 million adults cannot read with minimal competency." That leaves somewhere between 100 million and 200 million adults in the U.S. who aren’t functionally illiterate (several times the population of England when English poetry was at its zenith), not to mention several hundred million English-speaking adults in other countries, and also not including non-adults, many of whom can and do read, as evidenced by the sales of Harry Potter books. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but if we only count good poets, why should we concern ourselves with the numbers of bad readers? Do sufficient readers exist to keep book publishers pumping out non-poetry books? Amazingly, they do. And readers proliferate like rabbits. There are more readers on the planet today than there ever have been, and there will be more of them tomorrow, as sure as death and surer than taxes.

The feature of Lincoln Cathedral I find most interesting is this: with all our modern technology, we have few, if any, buildings to rival it in terms of emotionally satisfying architecture. Only a soulless man would choose a perfectly symmetrical modern skyscraper over this outlandishly asymmetrical mixture of early English and Norman architecture, with a little bit of this and a dash of that thrown in over the course of a millennium of near-constant construction. By 1311 it was the tallest building in Europe, and because it stands on a steep hill (called, in the British way, "Steep Hill"), it is to this day (if tour guides are to be believed) at the highest elevation of any building immediately east of it, all the way to the Pacific coast of Russia. In the same way, poets of yore seized the high ground of literature and have never relinquished it. Was the penner of "Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song" a better poet than our more technologically savvy crop of postmodernists? Let me offer the poem’s closing lines as evidence:

With an host of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.

Yet I will sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.

You have to read this whole incredible poem to get the full effect (the poem is available on the Masters page of The HyperTexts, on-line at www.thehypertexts.com), but I would venture rather unadventurously to say that there are few poems in recent memory with lines to rival these. Here we have Don Quixote compressed into a few lines of overmastering brilliance. Does the best of rap or cowboy poetry or performance poetry rival this poem? While I find Eminem entertaining, Robert Service serviceable, and poetry slams WWF- ishly amusing (envisioning 90-pound anemics attempting piledrivers), I optimistically hold out hope that when poets write again to this poem’s high standard (which means with imagination, passion and fierce energy), the more things change the more they will stay the same. Gioia says "The technology used to present information is never neutral." But I would counter that it is more important that the information is never neutral, because the technology is merely container and transport. If our truffles arrive in perfect condition, do we care if they came by jet or truck? Does Hamlet read less well on paper than on CD? Or is it a masterpiece regardless of the method of presentation, be it print, stage, theater, CD, DVD, .PDF? Is it possible that modern poetry has become too academic, too intellectual, too passive, too passionless, too enervate, too neutral? Is poetry’s medium the problem, or is the problem that poetry is too medium, too lukewarm?

While it is exciting to see the revival of popular poetry, and I am a fan of popular poetry in its better forms, there is also an inherent danger that cannot be ignored. At one time I was a moderator on a popular Internet poetry board with thousands of beginning to intermediate poets, and the subject of Tupac Shakur’s poetry was raised. Before venturing an opinion, I read a number of his poems, and I found them to be abysmally bad, riddled with clichés and sentimentalism. Is Tupac one of the saviors of poetry? Not in my book. Eminem has talent and is at times wickedly clever, but he is no Blake, Whitman or Frost. He seems to be a cult of one, akin to a Plath or Sexton. I find it hard to envision any of the popular rappers, cowboy poets or performance poets leading us like Moses out of Eliot’s Wasteland.

I am also suspicious of Gioia’s distinction of "literary poetry" from "popular poetry." How "literary" was the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Blake, in the eyes of the cultural elitists of their times? Not very. Frost and Cummings were popular poets; were they therefore not literary? Perhaps such headings are useful, in a general way, but the best popular poetry and even popular song lyrics have a way of eventually priming the Western Canon. For instance, "Jabberwocky," "Auld Lang Syne" and "To Celia" appear in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. And even lines from songs that have not yet infiltrated Norton are as enshrined in the English language as those of Shakespeare and Milton. Bob Dylan has singlehandedly added memorable bits of poetry to the modern lexicon: for instance, "blowin’ in the wind" and "don’t think twice, it’s all right." Perhaps the only useful distinction to be made is between literary and non-literary poetry, since it goes without saying that literary poetry is massively unpopular. The question then becomes: what is it about modern literary poetry that makes it so unpopular, compared to the poetry that people like? The answer is simple: poets have abandoned everything that once attracted people to poetry: meter, rhyme, story, song, meaning. If godawfully bad lyrics can induce hordes of people to clap their hands and stomp their feet, what might happen if a really good poet wrote a modern-day "Tom O’Bedlam?" The mind boggles.

Let me now explain that fogbound sea. I see two possible futures for poets. They can cling to the vanishing high towers of intellectualism, or they can adapt to their new environment. Perhaps some monkish Formalist poet will whisper words of power from the last rampart and the deluge will cease and the waters recede. Or perhaps a new breed of poets will take to the sea like Kevin Costner in Waterworld, on flotillas of boats, rafts, surfboards and jet skis. What I do not doubt is that poetry, good poetry, will exist and thrive as long as the human race endures. And when rap and cowboy poetry are footnotes akin to disco and mood rings, the very best poets will be remembered and recited, along with Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.

All we need is for a poet with the talent, dedication and vision of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton to present himself, or herself. My bet is that such a poet is with us already, perhaps even reading these words.