It took off and sold all over the world. We tried to represent the greatest of English literary works in two volumes. And over the years, the bigger it's gotten, the better it's sold. It's the focus of his essay in The Persistence of Poetry , and it harks back to his wartime research in Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Lab. The fourth dimension is vibrantly displayed in the way Robert Pinsky articulates his poems or in the speeches of the great black orators like Martin Luther King Jr. and even in rap music, Abrams noted.
Rap is far from an abstract, dematerialized mode of utterance.
I hate a lot of rap because it's bad stuff, but it does emphasize the articulatory aspect of the words. Amidst the noise of 21st century infotainment media, a Romantic poet like Keats may be as hard to hear as a man trying to shout words into a radio over the noise of tanks and bombs. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.