Matthew Arnold has made a famous, as-of-yet-unfulfilled prediction regarding the future of poetry.
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay … Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.
What Matthew Arnold failed to take into consideration was the paralyzing mediocrity that has overwhelmed this world. Not only has poetry not eclipsed religion (perhaps the term ‘dogma’ is easier to grasp in this context), but it has indeed become virtually extinct itself. The future of poetry looks grim, because the future of humanity looks grim itself.
