A poet not being read may take consolation in the number of artists who were misunderstood in their own time and only properly appreciated by posterity. But of course we do not know how many authors have consoled themselves thus without ever being discovered by those who came afterwards.
The idea of the misunderstood genius is a sideproduct of the romantic idea of the genius. Thus roughly 200 years old. It also coincides with the emergence of a book market and an expanded reading public. Which is to say sales figures that offer a very exact estimate of the extent of one’s not being read. Yet, around 1800 publishing was still cumbersome and expensive enough to keep the number of published works so small that even those who did not sell well would mostly get a mention in the reviews. Not so today. It is easier, cheaper, faster to publish than ever before and then to archive not only the published work but also all the intermediate drafts produced along the way. Posterity must be very patient indeed to sift through all these words.
Or has our 15 second, 140 character, post- culture, which has already and repeatedly heard the end of history proclaimed, made it impossible to write for something as anachronistic as posterity? And what consolation is then left for the unread writer?
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 