Considerations, Part 1: Dana Gioia on Poetic Criticism

This is the first of a ten-part series of selections from major essays by poets about poetry. These are not offered as representative of our own views, though some may be; rather, we believe they are important thoughts that bear rethinking.


From Can Poetry Matter by Dana Gioia, 1992

Reviewers fifty years ago were by today's standards extraordinarily tough. They said exactly what they thought, even about their most influential contemporaries. Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it "gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter." That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it "might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient." Or read Weldon Kee's one-sentence review of Muriel Rukeyser's Wake Island: "There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy." But these same reviewers could write generously about poets they admired, as Jarrell did about Elizabeth Bishop, and Kees about Wallace Stevens. Their praise mattered, because readers knew it did not come lightly.

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty, even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility, they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.

Like all genuine intellectuals, these critics were visionary. They believed that if modern poetry did not have an audience, they could create one. And gradually they did. It was not a mass audience; few American poets of any period have enjoyed a direct relationship with the general public. It was a cross-section of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers...The public enjoyed their efforts. Poetry anthologies were an indispensable part of any serious reader's library...read and reread by a diverse public. Favorite poems were memorized. Poetry mattered outside the classroom.

Today these general readers constitute the audience that poetry has lost...However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience, who represent poetry's bridge to the general culture.

Gioia goes on to posit six prosposals for the improved health of poetry with this preface:

If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish, and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture. I don't think this is impossible. All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.

As most relevant to the portion of the essay discussed above, we point out the third of his six proposals:

Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications. They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary literary criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

The questions we raise are these:

1) Have we poets today willing to take the risks of offering serious and negative reviews? In other words, have we poets of moral courage? Who are they?

2) Are there voices today who "charge modern poetry with cultural importance?" Whose voices are these?

3) Do poets concern themselves with regaining the reader's trust? If so, how? If not, why not?

4) Does there exist a "public idiom" about poetry? Should there exist such an idiom?

5) Has professional courtesy, in fact, taken the place of honesty?