Do you remember the movie "Grumpy Old Men 2"? Well, you're watching it.

Every now and then, some old dude says something about how things aren’t as good as they used to be, and about how the culture is in decline, and about how no one reads poetry anymore, and about how anyway today’s poetry pales in comparison to the great work of past, and blah blah blah. This sort of argument is in no way surprising. What is surprising is that people respond to it, again and again, with either sympathy or outrage.

Case in point is Joseph Epstein’s recent review of a revised edition of T.S. Eliot’s letters, in which he suggests that no poet today could be a powerful as Eliot:

The unsolved mystery is why no poetry written since the time of Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Frost, or possibly Auden has anything like the same memorability as theirs . . . Wallace Stevens’s poetry is more beautiful, and Robert Frost’s often more powerful, than Eliot’s, but the latter’s, once read, refuses to leave the mind. . . Eliot was the equivalent in literature of Albert Einstein in science in that everyone seemed to know that these men were immensely significant without quite knowing for what.

Oh, you didn’t know? “Memorability” is a critical category. It’s very well-theorized. It apparently refers to…absolutely nothing, except possibly some cranky old dude’s taste in stuff he read when he was a cranky young dude.

Anyway, despite the fact that such “criticism” in no way engages in any sort of discourse that, say, makes any sense, there has been a flurry of blog commentary. The official blog of the Library of America reports on a number of these responses, none of which address the fundamental problem: Epstein’s argument is not based on anything, and questions such as “is our culture dying or vibrant?” literally cannot be answered, because such questions are composed entirely of undefined terms.