I don’t universally agree with what Curtis White writes here, but does pen some lines that chills this would-be poet to his very bones:

Even allowing for the possibility that Amazon will be a benign monopoly and will encourage or at least tolerate the continued unruly flowering of this thing we have known as literature, if you thought it was hard to find a book spine out at a superstore, try finding that book of poetry that changes your life and that you didn’t know you were looking for in the web’s ether, “in the cloud,” as the techno-hip say. You’d have better luck finding a speck of gold in a bucket of sand.

Mr. White does bemoan the death of  book culture, but seems to think that great works will live on. He doesn’t say ‘literature’ because part of his purpose is doing away with that concept.

But, I wonder whether ‘it’ (literature, great works, etc) will really live on? He quotes a bit of Keats as an example of something immortal.

But will such things remain immortal?

How many plays by Sophocles were lost time? Or the rumored lost play of Shakespeare? What about the lost books of Artistotle? The books burnt when the Library of Alexandria caught fire?

How were they immortal?

Or on a more philosophical note, in what way does a great poem exist truly exist if no one reads it?