If we keep the honorific name “poetry” to mean “verse that succeeds in achieving lasting interest over time,” we are still uncertain of the amount of “poetry” being produced by our own century. There is a great deal of verse being written, all of it, of course, of documentary interest to sociologists or anthropologists or cultural critics. For such scholars, the overt message, or representation of life in a poem, means more than the skill with which that message or representation has been arranged. We all read for message and picture, but readers with a strong commitment to poetry as an art require in it those new symbolic structures, invented by talented artists of every age, that both affront and refresh. An experienced reader of poetry is soon bored by the already known and the clichéd; but the previously unheard, the previously unknown, arranged in a form true to a temperament, and transmitting a shock of pleasure — this makes for the renewal of both life and art. It is this capacity of poetry to rewrite the old that we value in it, that we search out in it, and that we judge it by.