Few, if any, modern poets have stood up against the wave of decay and mediocrity that has inculcated modern culture. For Sanfilip, poetry''s lack of importance to modern culture is indicative of a deeper trauma at work. In Poetry in the Age Impurity, he spells out the end game of our culture''s long refusal to face true existence and exposes the false mirror modern society has created for itself. In Sanfilip''s view, the death of poetic consciousness is emblematic of the crisis at hand. At the same time, he points a way both outward and inward to the perilous, metaphysical path necessary to find true being beyond the vacuity he sees swallowing up the West in ennui, cynicism and self-hatred. He challenges the warped values of our time, while at the same time laying out a psychic road map back to authenticity. Not since Shelley''s A Defence of Poetry or the Surrealists manifestoes of the 1920''s has a living poet been willing to stand up against the tide of decay eating away at the heart
