Poetry doesn’t matter to most people. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, whichdemand a good deal of attention and considerate analytic skills, as【M1】______well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry. In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were bestsellers, yet they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few【M2】______choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps false, that people【M3】______actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives thatentertained and inspired. They gave them words to attach to their【M4】______feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In the sense, music and【M5】______poetry joined hands. In the 20th century, something went to amiss. Poetry became【M6】______"difficult". That is, poets began to reflect the complex of modern【M7】______culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle and T.S. Eliot asked a lot of the reader, including a rangeof cultural references to topics when even in the early 1900s had【M8】______become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with easy, for【M9】______instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educatedreaders in the past. The same could be said for most readers in the【M10】______20th century—or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. 【M10】