News at Eleven: They printed a lot of bad poetry,

he [Donald Hall] acknowledges, but they also labored under the gaze of the old poets they admired.

"We wanted, like Keats, to be among the English poets when we died," Hall writes. "The name of poet was glorious to us, as it was to Milton. Shakespeare and Jonson and Dryden wanted to write lines of epics that would live forever. Maybe I should whisper it--it was naïve and perhaps farcical in its self-regard--but so did we."

from The Concord Monitor: A brief story of a life in poetry

~~~~~~~~~~~