Some claim the best stopped writing first. For the others, no one noted when or why. A few observers voiced their mild regret about another picturesque, unprofitable craft that progress had irrevocably doomed.
—Dana Gioia, in “The Silence of the Poets”
From time to time there appears a volume of criticism that, in the course of its attention to particular works of art, illuminates a good many more questions about our artistic and cultural affairs than are specifically addressed in its pages. Criticism tends to be at its best, of course, when it is most specific, when it derives its taste and standards from a particular artistic discipline and has something new and intelligent to say about the practice of the art from which it springs. Yet from Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets to T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood to Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age, the most important criticism has always done something more than this. It has brought us up to date on the condition of art, on the place it now occupies in the world at large, and on the historical imperitives that may imperil its very existence. Criticism of this kind follows the course of art itself in making vital connections between art and life.
The volume of criticism that Dana Gioia has recently published under the title Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture is a book of this sort. 1While it has much to
