Can modern poetry be saved?

At the same time, Edmundson’s premise requires some scrutiny. He focuses primarily on the species of poet whose work appears in organs like The New Yorker, where verse is treated, much like the magazine’s infamous cartoons, as page filler, utterly subordinate to the long-form journalism and fiction that dominates the magazine’s feature well. “Many of the poems published in, say, The New Yorker feel just like the linguistic equivalent of a vanilla-scented candle,” the author Courtney Queeney noted in 2009. A year later, Slate observed that New Yorker poems tend to obsess over the craft of poetry itself. By design, New Yorkerpoems don’t distract or tantalize. They don’t grasp for what lies beyond, much less the reality before us. They don’t question authority. Of course, this may concern members of the literati like Mark Edmundson. But it is not exactly proof of a decaying form.