Poetry doesnt matter to most people. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21

st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerate analytic skills, as【M1】______ well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry. In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, yet they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few【M2】______ choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps false, that people【M3】______ actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. They gave them words to attach to their【M4】______ feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In the sense, music and【M5】______ poetry joined hands. In the 20th century, something went to amiss. Poetry became【M6】______ "difficult". That is, poets began to reflect the complex of modern【M7】______ culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle and T.S. Eliot asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics when even in the early 1900s had【M8】______ become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with easy, for【M9】______ instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past. The same could be said for most readers in the【M10】______ 20th century—or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts.

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