Abstract

Certain general ideas come up repeatedly, in various guises, when contemporary poetry is discussed. One of these might be described as the question of what, if anything, is our social responsibility as poets.That is, there are things writers owe the art of poetry—work, perhaps. And in a sense there are things writers owe themselves—emotional truthfulness, attention toward one’s own feelings. But what, if anything, can a poet be said to owe other people in general, considered as a community? For what is the poet answerable? This is a more immediate—though more limited—way of putting the question than such familiar terms as “political poetry.”Another recurring topic is what might be called Poetry Gloom. I mean that sourness and kvetching that sometimes come into our feelings about our art: the mysterious disaffections, the querulous doubts, the dispirited mood in which we ask ourselves, has contemporary poetry gone downhill, does anyone at all read it, has poetry become a mere hobby, do only one’s friends do it well, and so forth. This matter often comes up in the form of questions about the “popularity” or “audience” of poetry.Possibly the appetite for poetry really was greater in the good old days, in other societies. After the total disaster at Syracuse, when the Athenians, their great imperialist adventure failed, were being massacred, or branded as slaves with the image of a horse burned into the forehead, a few were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose work, it seems, was well thought of by the Syracusans. “Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens,” writes Plutarch,Are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems and others, when straggling after the fight, had been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics. Robert Pinsky teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book of poems, History of My Heart, was awarded the William Carlos Williams Prize. His other books include Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, and a volume of criticism, The Situation of Poetry. Mindwheel, his narrative entertainment for computer, has been issued by Brøderbund Software