At any given time in history the literary scene will seem confused to those who are living through it and it is the selectivity of posterity that makes the pattern and orders of eminence appear clearly defined to the retrospective view It is fairly safe to say that at the present time there is an especially bewildering complexity of poetic tendencies of kinds of poetry being written of warring factions of ways of presenting criticising and teaching poetry and of conflicting beliefs about the role of the poet in society 