Great Regulars: "Modern poetry seems all too often

to be associated with coy, small-minded ironists: teasing, finicky word players who often write in disappointingly short lines and seem to lack the ambition, the emotional force, the rhetorical reach and even the range of subject matter of the great poets of the past," sniffed a reviewer in The Economist last month.

"It appears that (today) poetry is dispensable," observed philosophy professor Paul Woodruff in "The Necessity of Theater" (Oxford University Press, $17.95), "and indeed poetry survives now mainly in the precious sphere of art poetry--poets writing for poets. . . ."

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Poetry's demise is greatly exaggerated

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