Can Poetry Matter? Part II

Despite Gioia’s sound proposals for saving poetry from itself, his justly-famous essay nevertheless falters on a couple of points. First, he seems too conservative in imagining the audience poetry might have. He wants poetry to speak again to the “2 percent of the U.S. population” that represents our “cultural intelligentsia,” “the people who support the arts—who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films, serious theatre, opera, symphony and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals.” Given how small poetry’s audience has become, Gioia can perhaps be forgiven his realistic hopes about the audience poetry might plausibly win back. Still, as the editor of an anthology of poems written in the 1930s by workers and organizers and published in their various union newspapers, and as a critic who reveres the public role poetry played in various political movements of the twentieth century, I would prefer not to limit poetry’s imagined audience from the outset to the “cultural intelligentsia.” It has had a more democratic audience in the past, and we shouldn’t rule out from the start it having another one again.

More serious, though, is the—to be brutally honest about it—the lame case Gioia makes for why poetry should matter. His first reason concerns the relation between poetry and language. Because poetry forces us to pay attention to language, readers of poetry may be less taken in by “intellectual leaders”—politicians, preachers, copywriters, newscasters—who seek to enslave us through their manipulations of language. Poetry can thus help to keep “the nation’s language clear and honest.”

I like that reason a lot, actually, but it is almost spoiled by the second one Gioia offers, which is that as the fate of poetry goes, so goes the fate of other forms of American high culture. In other words, if we can rescue poetry from its marginal position, we can rescue serious drama, jazz, and classical music as well. And while that sounds nice in principle, it also seems hopelessly circular. Indeed, it tells us nothing about what poetry can do for us—unlike Gioia’s lesson about poetry and language—only about what it might do for the other arts. What those other arts could do for us, though, remains unclear.

To be fair, no one is asking Gioia to also justify these other forms of American high culture; but at the same time he cannot rest half of his defense of poetry on them either. If my spouse asks me why I’m tearing up the fence in our backyard, and I answer that because otherwise the shovel wouldn’t get used, she is not likely to find my answer very persuasive.

After all, it could well be that a culture does not truly need poetry or any of these other forms of American high culture. Surely there are other, even more democratic ways, to teach people how to keep our language—and our politics—honest and clear. Nor can one necessarily appeal to our desire for beauty or aesthetics to justify poetry since people already seem to be fulfilling that desire quite nicely, and doing so through genres, modes, and forms of culture—fiction, popular music, film, sports—that have nothing to do with poetry.

So “Can Poetry Matter” is a slightly different and, indeed, easier question to ask than “Should Poetry Matter?” and, if so, “Matter for What?”