In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Case for Poetry
  • Henry Hart (bio)
Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini (Yale University Press, 2008. 224 pages. $24)

In his controversial essay “Can Poetry Matter?” published in 1991, the poet-critic (and current director of the National Endowment for the Humanities) Dana Gioia argues: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.” Gioia blames many factors for the decline of poetry’s influence in the public domain, among them “the decline of literacy, the proliferation of other media, the crisis in humanities education, the collapse of critical standards, and the sheer weight of past failures.” His essay, which incurred the wrath of critics and poets alike, offers a gloomy diagnosis, but also prescribes a cure. It concludes with six “modest proposals” that encourage “poets and poetry teachers [to] take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.”

Jay Parini’s new book, Why Poetry Matters, alludes to Gioia’s essay and provides an elegant, acute, and multifaceted answer to his question “Can Poetry Matter?” While Parini acknowledges the insularity of poetry in contemporary culture, his approach to the problem differs from Gioia’s. Rather than indict creative-writing programs (Gioia maintains “they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto”), Parini places most of the blame on the noisy seductiveness of other media. “The culture is clamorous,” he observes, “with a television blaring in most living rooms, magazines proliferating, and earphones downloading a great deal of garbage into the heads of millions on the subways and byways of the world. There is little time for concentration, or a space wherein the still, small voice of poetry can be heard.” Why Poetry Matters is a history, an anthology, and also a meditation that pays tribute to poetry’s “still, small voice” struggling in the cultural wilderness of more powerful and more popular forms of communication.

Poets and scholars have long tried to define the nebulous “essence” of poetry in a way that distinguishes it from other media. Parini is more qualified than most to attempt such a definition because he has worked in many different genres: he is a [End Page lii] distinguished poet and critic as well as a distinguished biographer, editor, and novelist (his novel about Tolstoy, The Last Station, is currently being made into a feature film starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren). Parini begins his book by examining the prejudice against poetry in Western culture that extends as far back as Plato and Socrates. The two Greek philosophers denigrated poetry, Parini reminds us, because they thought it trafficked in lies, in imitations of imitations (linguistic imitations of things that were imitations of ideal forms). Plato excluded poets from his utopian Republic because they valued frenzied inspiration and passion over calm rational philosophy. In mounting his case for poetry against its numerous detractors, Parini alludes to Sir Philip Sidney’s famous “Apology for Poetry,” Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry,” and many other treatises that defend as well as define poetry. Because poetry is essentially shaped language, Parini sensibly focuses on its linguistic elements—its figures of speech and formal patterns—that have traditionally distinguished poetry (and continue to distinguish it) from other genres and media. He goes on to contemplate the ways it has addressed religious, political, and scientific (especially ecological) issues in the past and present.

If there is one central idea that resonates through Parini’s book, it is that “poetry aspires to the condition of scripture.” In his preface he candidly remarks: “The language of poetry can, I believe, save us. It can ground us in spiritual and moral realities, offering the consolations of philosophy, teaching us how to speak about our lives, and how—indeed—to live them.” Parini is no aesthete advocating art for art’s sake. Instead he is a transcendental pragmatist whose roots as a critic, he admits, align him with Emerson, Coleridge, and other romantic thinkers who emphasized the redemptive and transcendental aspects of poetry. For Parini “poetry becomes useful [by] helping readers to comprehend their lives, to catch their ideas in language, [and] to...

pdf

Share