So when did poets stop doing it?

From On Adding Phrases to the Language by T. Greer.

George Orwell was a fantastic essayist. One of my favorite of his small essays is his response to an essay by T.S. Eliot that assessed the life and work of Rudyard Kipling. I am not sure what it was about Rudyard Kipling that brought out the best in so many other intellectuals, but the attempts of Kipling's contemporaries to summarize and respond to what they thought Kipling symbolized always produced interesting results. Orwell covers a lot of ground in his little essay, but I want to focus today on an observation Orwell makes about Kipling's linguistic legacy:

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West.
The white man's burden.
What do they know of England who only England know?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived their context by many years. The phrase ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’, for instance, was current till very recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word ‘Huns’ for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914.

But what the phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be ‘For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May’), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane-geld? The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (’palm and pine’ — ‘east of Suez’ — ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that are of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him. ‘White man's burden’ instantly conjures up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to ‘black man's burden’. One may disagree to the middle of one's bones with the political attitude implied in ‘The Islanders’, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.[1]

Greer goes on to list a number of other phrases which have entered the language, primarily from poets.

T.S. Eliot

Not with a bang but a whimper
April is the cruelest month
Hollow men

George Orwell

Some animals are more equal than others
Big Brother is watching you
We have always been at war with Eastasia
Who controls the past controls the future
War is peace / Freedom is slavery / Ignorance is strength
Thought Police
Newspeak

Lewis Carol

Through the looking glass
Down the rabbit hole
Cheshire cat smile
Off with her head
Mad as a hatter

Greer goes on

As late as 1962 Joseph Heller was able to add "catch-22" to the English lexicon. But adding phrases to the language is first and foremost a poet's game.

So when did poets stop doing it?

There are different ways to mark when poetry left the public scene. One might ask, as I have just done, what is the last piece of verse to have "added a phrase to the language?" One might ask, as I recently did on twitter "what is the last poem that a plurality of educated American can be expected to recognize?" Or one might ask "who was the last poet who was a nationally or internationally known public intellectual (in their own lifetime)?" Or even, "Who was the last poet well known enough to have a caricature, a public persona?"

His answer

But [Dylan] Thomas was the last poet to succeed so brilliantly. This was with a poem published in 1951. His competitors for fame and memory—I have mentioned W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath, though a few more of the first generation to write after modernism might be added—wrote in the same era. Sylvia Plath was dead by 1963; Hughes died in '67 and Auden in '73. Ginsberg outlived them all for a few decades more, but his role at the center of the national conversation did not survive the hippies. The 1950s was the last decade that poets existed as more than a punch-line.

So poetry ceased to be consequential in the 1950s. Where do our new phrases come from now?

What actually replaced poetry was film. Review a few of the hundreds of lines from film scripts you unthinkingly reference or hear referenced every month:

I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse
We're not in Kansas anymore
Here's looking at you, kid
Go ahead, make my day.
Love means never having to say you're sorry.
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship
What we have here is a failure to communicate
There's no place like home
I'm walkin' here!
You can't handle the truth!
Round up the usual suspects.
I'll have what she's having.
Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!
Life is like a box of chocolates
'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
Elementary, my dear Watson.
Get your stinking paws off me!
You ain't heard nothin' yet!
That escalated quickly
Hasta la vista, baby.
I feel the need—the need for speed!

I can't believe he missed

And quit calling me Shirley.