Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People

Beautiful feelings of sensitive people is just a five-word way of explaining to someone who never reads poetry what we are hoping to find in a book of poems. It is the most unifying (and featureless?) description I could find. It is not there to exclude political poetry - to have beautiful feelings and not wish for a beautiful world would be like lying on a beach for eight hours and not noticing that there is an ocean just in front of you. In fact, wanting to be Greta Thunberg is a beautiful feeling in itself. It describes a wide range of 21st century poetry but perhaps not the majority. The figures suggest that there is a public verdict on the poetry of the past, so of the period say 1970 to 2000, which is utterly favourable - people have an image of Being a Poet and they want to go and inhabit that image. It is a Yes vote. Maybe all those struggles were not in vain. But, that wish to be a poet does not necessarily mean you have much interest in the work of other poets.