In such commercially viable forms as the novel, the number is probably ten times that. The critic already knows what everyone else is learning, and that is Gresham's Law exists, and applies to print. Having survived the ideological schisms of the 1930's, the culture wars of the 1980's, and all the morasses of the decades in between, it seems rather strange that writers should ultimately be defeated by themselves, or more properly, by their numerical proliferation but such is the historical situation facing us today. It exercised a selectivity and cast contempt on writings that had not succeeded in being printed. This situation still obtains, but is attenuated by the low cost of mechanical typography.
All progress ends by negating itself.
Having arrived at its maximum expansion, it tends to reestablish the primitive state which it was intended to replace. The Broadway musical attracts an audience to the theater, even to the theater of Moliere, as dime-store adventure novels attract boys to The Count of Monte Cristo . Poetry, however, finds no audience today through its popular manifestations, makes no best-seller lists, and languishes as an academic specialization. It has no recognized laws, no standards, and thus, formless, has become the form that everyone may attempt. The breakdown of criticism in letters is general, as I have said, but its effects on poetry have been particularly acute.