(My “Sunday night poetry” series is over, but I can’t seem to stop myself from posting about poetry on Sunday night.)

Colin Martindale, the psychologist who wrote the 1990 book The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change, also wrote a 2009 paper, “The Evolution and End of Art as a Hegelian Tragedy,” in which he claimed that “poetry is on the edge of extinction, and . . . classical music, painting, and sculpture are already extinct.” He based this claim on the idea that art must be both novel and comprehensible, and that the drive for novelty would eventually cause art to become incomprehensible.