This swarm of mediocre poets

An interesting diagnosis. From The World as Will and Representation, section 51, footnote 41 by Arthur Schopenhauer.

It is worth serious consideration how great an amount of time – their own and other people’s – and of paper is wasted by this swarm of mediocre poets, and how injurious their influence is. For the public always seizes on what is new, and shows even more inclination to what is perverse and dull, as being akin to its own nature. These works of the mediocre, therefore, draw the public away and hold it back from genuine masterpieces, and from the education they afford. Thus they work directly against the benign influence of genius, ruin taste more and more, and so arrest the progress of the age.