A poet / teacher on mediocre poetry:

"As for the presence of so much failed or mediocre or formulaic work piling up around the ostensible "real thing"--that also seems to me a normal and healthy process. In a great pyramid, most of the stones are inside--not polished, not perfect. Some, very few, are the visible, sharp-edged outside stones by which we feel we know the pyramid to be a pyramid. In poetry, some of us are laying the inside stones. Some of us those shiny outer edges. The aim is to build the glorious thing. And if you look back at any period in the history of poetry in this language there are really so very few poets whose work endures--rarely more than two or three in a generation--and yet all that "poorer" work was always being written, all around them, perhaps in some crucial way actually permitting them to do their work. How often one finds the stated "major influence" on some magnificent poet to be some "minor" poet whose work simply doesn't make any real sense as an influence on the "great" one. Who knows what we all give each other--it's such a mysterious process. And yet, somehow, letting everyone add their share, century after century, it gets done."