*
a couple quotes:
from the TLS, 07/98/11, page 9, Tim Blanning reviewing an anthology of European Romanticism notes that many Romantics sought
'an alliance that was populist . . . . for cultural value in any society was not to be found among the classically educated elites, with their sophisticated but artificial culture, but with the common people. . . . The Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi proclaimed: "folk poetry is indeed the true poetry. Let us set about making it supreme!" He was writing in 1847, the year before a wave of revolution swept across Continental Europe and gave retrospective piquancy to his further observation that "if the people rules in poetry, the day cannot be far off when it will rule in politics too." '
and:
from Laurie Smith's essay, "Subduing the reader," in Magma magazine—
(http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=14974)
:— the last sentence from its penultimate paragraph:
"We need always to be alert to writers who claim that good poetry must be difficult, accessible only to the educated few, and see this claim for what it is - fascist."
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