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    Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry
    Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry
    Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

    By Robert Pinsky

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    The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.


    There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.


    As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateApr 11, 2009
    ISBN9781400825158
    Author

    Robert Pinsky

    Robert Pinsky was the nation’s Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. An acclaimed poet and scholar of poetry, he is also an internationally renowned man of letters. His Selected Poems was published in paperback in March 2012. His other books include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide and his bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.

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      Book preview

      Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry - Robert Pinsky

      Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

      T H E U N I V E R S I T Y C E N T E R F O R H U M A N V A L U E S S E R I E S

      AMY GUTMANN AND STEPHEN MACEDO EDITORS

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      Freedom of Association edited by Amy Gutmann Work and Welfare by Robert M. Solow

      The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee

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      Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry by Robert Pinsky

      ROBERT PINSKY

      Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

      P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S P R I N C E T O N A N D O X F O R D

      Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Pinsky, Robert.

      Democracy, culture and the voice of poetry / Robert Pinsky.

      p. cm. — (University Center for Human Values) Includes index.

      eISBN: 978-1-40082-515-8 (alk. paper)

      1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.

      2. United States—Intellectual life—20th century.

      3. Democracy in literatures. 4. Culture in literature.

      5. Poetry.I. Title.II. University Center for Human Values series.

      PS323.5 .P57 2002

      811'.509358—dc212002025288

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Janson

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      www.pupress.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      To my colleagues and helpers at

      The Favorite Poem Project

      Boston University

      236 Bay State Road

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      I Culture

      II Vocality

      III Self-Consciousness

      IV Performance

      V Social Presence

      VI Readers

      VII The Narcissistic and the Personal

      VIII Models of Culture

      IX Conclusion

      Acknowledgments

      I thank the Princeton University Center for Human Values for inviting me to give the Tanner Lectures, and also for providing four vital, insightful and generous public respondents. I am grateful to A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Galassi, John Hollander and Marianna De Marco Torgovnick for their engaged and imaginative discussions of what I said. This published version of the lectures has benefited from their collegiality.

      This book approaches its subject partly through the Favorite Poem Project, which has depended upon the vision and support provided by Boston University, the Carnegie Education Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. I am personally grateful to Cliff Becker and William Ivey at the NEA, to Vartan Gregorian at the Carnegie Foundation, and to Jon Westling, president of Boston University, who in addition to his support participated in the Project by reading and memorably discussing Wallace Stevens’s poem The Idea of Order at Key West.

      Executive Producer Juanita Anderson, of Legacy Productions, surpassed expectation in producing the video segments. Jeffrey Brown, Jim Lehrer and Les Crystal of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer have helped the segments find their audience.

      I am indebted for their help to Christine Bauch, Emily Brandt, Rosemarie Ellis, Maggie Dietz and James Jayo.

      Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

      I

      Culture

      The term culture with its old agricultural and biological connotations has taken on a new, surprising centrality. In world affairs and in American electoral politics, in geopolitical analysis and in economics, culture has become a kind of ulterior cause of causes. It has been proposed that culture determines the power of a nation to achieve economic development, and that cultural more than political differences underlie electoral contests and atrocities, economic trends and terrorist acts. Cultural clashes seem to have replaced ideological strife. Even the directions and conceptions of science have been seen in cultural terms.

      Far from resisting this trend, I want to consider the voice of poetry—emphasizing its literal or actual voice—within the culture of American democracy, amid

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