Can Poetry Matter?

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

When it was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1991, Gioia's landmark article "Can Poetry Matter?" received more public response than any other piece in the magazine's history. This provocative essay collection, a contemporary classic now appearing in a special tenth-anniversary edition and featuring a new Introduction by the author, addresses more fully Gioia's key question: Is there a place for poetry in modern American mainstream culture?

Praise

"Gioia is an engaged, thoroughgoing, enthusiastic reader, one who infuses us with his passion for poetry. If you're an educated general reader, and you read only one book about contemporary poetry, this should be that book."—Ray Olson, Booklist

"No one, I think, has written with greater clarity or greater poignancy—or with a greater sense of urgency, either—about the 'subculture' in which the art of poetry is still confined."—Hilton Kramer, The New Criterion

"Can Poetry Matter? is an important book, and anyone who professes to care about the state of American poetry will have to take it into account."—World Literature Today

"This book is destined to be a classic."—Michael J. Bugeja, Columbus Dispatch

About the Author(s)

Dana Gioia

An acclaimed poet, essayist, anthologist, BBC commentator, and critic, Dana Gioia is the author of Interrogations at Noon, a collection of poems that received the American Book Award, and Nosferatu, a libretto. He was recently nominated to be Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his family.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Tenth-Anniversary Edition
Preface

Can Poetry Matter?
The Dilemma of the Long Poem
Notes on the New Formalism
Strong Counsel (Robinson Jeffers)
The Loneliness of Weldon Kees
The Anonymity of the Regional Poet (Ted Kooser)
Business and Poetry
Two Views of Wallace Stevens
The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man
The Emperor of Hartford
Bourgeois in Bohemia (T. S. Eliot)
The Successful Career of Robert Bly

Short Views
John Ashbery
Margaret Atwood
Jared Carter
James Dickey
Tom Disch
Maxine Kumin
Radcliffe Squires
Theodore Weiss

The Difficult Case of Howard Moss
Tradition and an Individual Talent (Donald Justice)
The Example of Elizabeth Bishop
The Poet in an Age of Prose