Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

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 significance at the very heart of democratic culture.