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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pinsky, Robert.

Contributor:

Poets Laureate Collection (Library of Congress)

Series:

University Center for Human Values series.

University Center for Human Values series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Democracy in literature.

Culture in literature.

Poetry.

United States--Intellectual life--20th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (108 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

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

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes index.

ISBN:

9786612087318

9781282087316

1282087312

9781400825158

1400825156

OCLC:

362799370