"To have great poets, there must be great audiences."Walt Whitman said a mouthful here. This has been true for as long as humankind has had language, 100,000 years by conservative estimates. In preliterate societies audiences defined poetry itself as being whatever was preserved verbatim; that which was left behind was prose.
Because of this, audiences developed mnemonics to help the tribe preserve its culture in poetry. Indeed, prosody might be humanity's first science.
"Can 100 monkeys on 100 typewriters for 100 years produce Shakespeare?"
The answer is "Yes" but, by my calculation, someone who doesn't know an anapest from Budapest or diaeresis from diarrhea will win two lotteries before producing a remarkable poem. Even if they could, another classic cliché raises its head:
"If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?"
Without one of those great audience members Whitman spoke about, the answer will be "No". Without these "bird dogs", the few efforts worth preserving may be overlooked. For example, two of the great poems of this century were created by newcomers. When "How Aimée remembers Jaguar" was posted to a critical forum one critic said: "Change nothing." Years later, when an editor asked if that critic could help him out of a dry spell the latter pulled a well worn hardcopy of that poem out of his back pocket.
You wrote your verses
with your veins,
cold against the wall.
Something to remember the next time we're tempted to complain about critics!
