8
PARTISAN REVIEW
communist have led to his excommunication? Could there be a Stalinist
unconscious in the cultural underground? Or could there have been such
a profound change in postmodern philosophy as to rule out the writings
of Hook? These are very disturbing and far-reaching hypotheses. But
what other explanation could there be?
The Life and Death
of
Poetry
Since Edmund Wilson asked some years
ago whether poetry is a dying technique, its health has been periodically
asserted and questioned. Now Dana Gioia, a young poet and critic, has
raised questions about the audience for poetry in a slim but formidable
collection of essays and reviews,
Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and
American Culture.
It
is formidable because it brings up the hard questions,
challenging accepted ideas and values about poets, poetry, literature, and
the culture. Gioia's outlook is mostly gloomy, but he does praise a num–
ber of poets while deploring the direction of much contemporary poetry.
Gioia's main complaint is that poetry has a tiny reading public, and
that the reason for its marginality is its ingrown character, its narrow lyri–
cism, and its academically-bounded habitat. There is much to be said for
this indictment. But I am not so sure of Gioia's location of causes for the
poetic malady, nor am I convinced his prescription for the cure will
work. Gioia's diagnosis of the illness is that the kind of poetry that might
engage a larger public - narrative poetry, longer poems, poetry with
larger public themes - has largely disappeared. He cites Robinson Jeffers
and Edwin Arlington Robinson wistfully as the last successful examples of
this endangered genre. He also blames the migration of poets into the
academy for the isolation of poetry, because of a shrinking of experience.
In addition, he laments the deadening effect of the new theorizing that
fills teachers' minds with abstractions far from the literary process.
Surely, some, if not all, of these observations are valid. Still, there are
a few unanswered questions - the basic one being why all this has hap–
pened. Admittedly, life as a teacher limits a poet's range of experience.
But why can't a poet who teaches think about the larger issues of the
time? There must be a more fundamental reason for the narrowing of vi–
sion to personal and lyrical subjects. The answer must lie in our collective
experience and in the culture as a whole. As compared to the situation in
America, the audience for poetry was far greater in the communist
countries, where poets like other writers and intellectuals were cast into
opposition to the government. This automatically created a more exten–
sive theme for the dissidents. And the reading public was not bombarded
as it is in this country by mesmerizing kitsch and popular culture. Hence
the solution to the problem - if it is a problem - lies not, as Gioia sug-
