Patrick Kurp writes about those single lines of beauty or clarity within otherwise unremarkable poems. He boils it down to this: “Art is the least democratic and most ruthless of masters. It doesn’t recognize sensitivity, fairness or anyone’s good intentions – writer’s, reader’s, critic’s. Nothing else, only the work, counts.”
Good point. When he mentioned that, the classic examples I thought of were “a rose-red city half as old as Time” and “Nature red in tooth and claw.”
Art is _hard_. Poetry is hard. I think poetry is particularly hard-up right now because the traditional training tools for making it are unfashionable. I mean, just try telling someone YOU’RE writing a few hundred lines of metered rhyme. Sonnets are slightly more respectable.