FratFiles

• Save Paper

As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly
May 1991
Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America.
If poets venture outside their confined world, they can
work
to make it essential once more
by Dana Gioia
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. Little of the frenetic
activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group.
As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests
in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain
residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost
invisible.
What makes the situation of contemporary poets
particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of
unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never
before been so many new books of poetry published, so
many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been
so......

View the rest of this paper...

Approximate Word Count: 7190
Approximate Pages: 29 (250 words per double-spaced page)