Love of poetry examined

WORLD’s Book of the Year in the category of arts and culture comes from Dana Gioia, one America’s most accomplished poet-critics. A former executive at General Foods who went on to serve as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and poet laureate of California, Gioia sparked a national debate with his 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” in which he considered the declining influence of verse. Gioia argued at the time that poets had abandoned general readers in search of academic acclaim and that poetry had suffered as a result.

Gioia has published six volumes of poetry and six collections of essays. In his latest collection of essays, Poetry as Enchantment (Paul Dry Books, 272 pp.), he continues his lifelong investigation into what makes poetry worth reading. These essays, as a whole, offer one of the most eloquent defenses in recent memory of the power of poetry’s musicality and the art’s spiritual nature.

They are also among Gioia’s most personal. “I wanted to put my whole self into the essays,” Gioia said, “not just my intellect but my emotions, imagination, and life experience … I wanted the reader to feel an actual human being behind the words.” A tough critic, Gioia said he wanted to focus on the writers he loved in this collection, several of whom he knew, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, and Donald Davie.

Gioia returns to his student days and recalls old friendships. He studied under Bishop at Harvard and Davie at Stanford. Bishop was “fiercely … self-critical,” never self-absorbed. Davie taught him to always be working and “exploring something new.” He learned from both that the path of the poet was a solitary one.

Gioia was an MBA student when he audited one of Davie’s classes. Gioia, who already knew he wanted to be a poet, remarks that he had “no interest in writing poetry or prose that excluded the intelligent common reader.” Davie, a “tough-minded poet-critic” who was “skeptical of artistic pretension,” was “exactly the sort of writer I wanted to become,” Gioia writes.

Davie’s lectures were “penitential exercises in self-examination performed, only half-disguised, in public.” “I should have guessed,” Gioia writes, “that he was in the process of re-embracing Christianity.”

Davie tended to reduce Christian poetry to “devotional or liturgical verse.” Gioia and his fellow students, however, were convinced that all great poetry touched on “something sacred”: “Developing ourselves as writers was not a career path,” he writes. Rather, “it represented our hope of self-transcendence.”

In the volume’s eponymous essay, Gioia explores how poetry touches our inner being through sound and meter. Poetry communicates something more than mere ideas through its “verbal textures”—its rhythm and self-­similarity—and through its “intuitive” structure.

Poetry also recalls us to ourselves. It awakens us, Gioia writes in another essay, “to a fuller sense of our humanity.” He revisits the work of Robert Frost and W.H. Auden, as well as lesser-known poets, like John Allan Wyeth, showing how these poets enlarge our “sense of the world, language, and the human heart.” Gioia praises the “charm, humanity, and freshness” of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s work and notes how Samuel Menashe’s short poems alternate between “the ecstatic and elegiac” in response to the joy of existence.

Gioia said he hoped his book would appeal to the “curious common reader.” These essays show a critic at the top of his game, who is able to communicate in a way few can the “physical and sensory power of verse.”

In the book, Gioia calls poetry “a special form of language that invites and rewards sustained attention,” but the prose of Poetry as Enchantment is also deeply rewarding. It is charming and rigorous, personal and profound—­making it one of the best collections of essays in years.

Next in this 2024 Books of the Year special issue: “Surprises and delights for younger readers.”