Camille Paglia remembers the 1960s, when poetry mattered. “But over the following decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious “theory” – which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to “read” any more – and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students.”