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......

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

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