What Makes a Popular Poet?
Popularity does not depend much on how skilled or moral a poet is. Faking skill or morality is equally difficult, except to fool people who are less discriminating in their analysis of one or the other. Some poets do not care about extreme popularity as much as for truth to what they call their vision. And vision is more related to content and moral issues than to technique or skill. Some poets are more interested in exercising their skill than in seeking to please readers. This is certainly ok. Exercise of sheer skill is a great pleasure to those who are able to do so. This is as true of poets as of trapeze artists. The ability to come up with immediate rhymes is as fulfilling to some people as more complex poetic skills are to others. Idealistic preference for either content or technique tends to make for excellence in the given aspect of poetry, but not for popularity except within a smaller audience of aficionados. Popularity is achieved more commonly by not writing over the head o
