DIFFICULT POETRY

"As long as society was united in its religious faith and its view of the universe, as long as the way in which people lived changed slowly, audience and artists alike tended to have much the same interests and to see much the same things."

"It is not until the great social and ideological upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that difficult poetry appears, some of Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and others. The example of these poets should warn us against condemning poetry because it is difficult."

—W.H. Auden on "Light Verse," as found in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939.