Tolkien is Not Yeats

[Lush]

Wait, so Tchaikovsky wasn't a genius?

Did I just make myself look really uneducated here?

Well, anyway, point taken, littleman. At the same time, I have to admit, while I enjoy JRR's poetry, he is definitely not Yeats. Or Pasternak. Or Keats. Or Eliot. And I don't think he ever strove to be compared to the likes of them either.

And anyway, the hack from Slate was trying to be clever a lá Wolcott, and, in my opinion, failed miserably in that regard.

Frankly, I think the most appropriate take on this whole thing was by one of our usual suspects, Squatter, who said:

Tolkien's shoes are too big for such a one not to try and shrink them, and how better to do so than to call a famous philologist a bad poet? I might as well call Pepys a bad novelist, or Shakespeare a bad historian.