In the past, however, the assimilation of a new style which was originally detested was most often the work not of critics but of the artists themselves. Look at what happened to Modern art, which today is considered to have begun as far back as the mid-19th Century. At first the term described the art of its day, but since then the term has been assigned to a certain historical period. And that sense of clarity is not just reassuring, it also demands less of the reader who does not have to suspend disbelief and of the writer, who does not have to work as hard at rendering a story believable. We certainly need an advocate for poetry.
Poetry is the least honoured and the most respected of our art forms.
And Canadian poetry, in the main, is horrible, consisting primarily of nuanced references to woodchippers, and surprisingly vulgar accounts of childbirth. To crown a laureate then would be something like appointing a pantomime artist to remember the dead for us each November - a poignantly awful idea. This probably says something about the relatively greater sophistication of British audiences. American - rather like that French thing for Jerry Lewis films. Yet the Argentine film industry in this period had retained a remarkable ability to stay afloat and adapt to the radical shifts of the forces in power.