Can serious poetry be funny?

There was a discussion in the comments at College Misery today about whether Classics teaches you that "there is nothing new under the sun." Many of the commenters endorsed the usefulness and coolness of Classics; a few rightly pointed out that no one discipline has a monopoly on providing perspective.

via Wikimedia Commons

I happened to read that post the same day I made a visit to our campus bookstore, and I think there's one thing Classics could teach us about: mixing genres in poetry. Trolling the clearance section, it's full of biographies of poets and books of modern poetry. I love poetry almost more than anything, and I can still understand why no one wants to buy those books. 

It's because enough of modern poetry consists of elitist navel-gazing that the entire genre gets pegged with that reputation. I hate to focus on any one poet here, because I deeply admire anyone who makes such a (relatively) neglected art their life's focus. But you know the kind of thing I mean. You hear it and think "wait, did I wander into an NPR studio without knowing it?"

Greek and Latin poets could teach the world a lot about making poetry better. For instance, you can make poetry witty, engaging and meditative all at once. Ask Ovid. Or Aristophanes. Or Aristarchus. Or Homer. We are the biggest cultural elitists of all in not allowing serious poetry to be occasionally amusing. Perhaps we fear the mixing of genre and tone as part of 'serious' writing because variety tends to be the key to commercial success, and commercial success is not supposed to coexist with intellectual seriousness.

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