Randall Jarrell and George Steiner – Contemporary Reading and Writing
In 1950, Harvard hosted a conference called “The Defense of Poetry” where Randall Jarrell delivered his famous lecture on “The Obscurity of the Poet.” To Jarrell the obscurity of contemporary poetic expression was less an absolute value and more the result of the decline of readers who relied on literary texts as a primary means of cultural edification. Twenty-eight years later, George Steiner (in “Text and Context,” the first essay in his renowned treatise, On Difficulty) came to the same conclusion, albeit with a different treatment of the subject matter, and offered a more draconian solution to the problem of the evaporating degrees of literacy among English readers.
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