The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.
Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.
Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
No opposing quotes found.