A High and Holy Art for All

These days, the world of contemporary American poetry is less one world than many. Never has so much poetry been published; rarely have there been more “camps” or “contingents” that have little to say to each other. This is not necessarily bad news. English-language poetry is a wide tent, and there is room for many different voices, styles, audiences, themes. But the reality is that the lack of a unifying vision, a shared sense of what poetry is and what it can do, has impoverished the art. In the absence of a cultural conviction about what role poetry plays in society, the lowest-common-denominator rule applies: poetry has become, for many, synonymous with (and reducible to) self-expression.