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.
