Gone, Forgotten

Where are the poetic and literary giants
of the past? Past, gone, forgotten -- from Byron
and Shelley to Hemingway. Legends in their
times, galvanizing the literate public with
their creative brilliance, they wrote
transcending works that echoed nature
and the nature of man, presaging their very
own fate as renowned arbiters of taste and
memory. 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
The king of kings, remote in time and legend
great in his time and commemorated through
timeless archaeological worship of a singular
time and a vibrant dynasty, who does his name
now recall; his time and his greatness? Even
award of a Nobel Prize for literature could
not now recognize a name once thought to be
immortalized in his great novels testifying to
the state of humankind, yet a search for his
published works in today's library is fruitless
for even librarians whose academic scholarship
acquainted them with the meaning and stature
of literature failed to apprise them adequately
of the literary figures predating their own.
Hemingway? the librarian responded to the
puzzled reader fruitlessly searching for The Sun
(which should) Also Rise/s. Never heard of him.
So, where now are the shapers of language
the chroniclers of the human spirit, Verne,
Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dumas, Plato and
Camus and Balzac and Aleichem; long gone
as dead as their oeuvre, absent from the
shelves of the public library serving you.