Laboratory for Contemporary Thinking

If we now start to claim that poetry lags behind life, it is like repeating something that has often been said. The idea that it lags behind modern life is not new - this idea, it seems to me, has existed since. as poetry itself has existed. We simply need to understand that the coefficient of selectivity in poetry is incomparably higher than, say, in prose. It is not by chance that Anatole France ironized the readers of poetry - with songs, he says, the case is the same as with women: the most beloved is always the best of all the others.