Can Poetry Matter? Quotes

“Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“There is more rejoicing in heaven over one lost poet found than in 99 novelists who have never strayed.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. [...] Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession—not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“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.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture