Analogy

Philosophy and poetry are mired in an ancient quarrel, so we’re told—on one side, the pursuit of demystifying truth; on the other, enchanted polyphony. And yet they have one thing in common: each is said to be in popular decline.

Where Philip Kitcher mourns a past in which “philosophers were avidly read by excited members of the public,” the poet Dana Gioia asked, in 1991, “Can Poetry Matter?” My review of Kitcher sparked a brief discussion in the London Review of Books; Gioia received 400 letters from readers, mostly positive, setting a record for The Atlantic.

His analysis is eerily parallel. “As a class poets are not without cultural status,” Gioia writes:

Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

The same could be said for philosophers: their name has an aura that its referents lack.

Judged by quantity, poetry is thriving: more books and poets than ever. Gioia estimates, in 1991, a thousand new collections of verse per year, tens of thousands of poetry readings, 20,000 poets minted annually by creative writing programs. Likewise, in philosophy: there are more active philosophers now than at any time in human history, producing more written work than ever before.

The problem is not quantity, and perhaps not even quality, but audience: the poets are predominantly housed in the academy, and they are read mostly by their students and each other. The poetic enterprise looks inward, not outward to the wider world, which basically ignores it: “Daily newspapers no longer review poetry,” Gioia laments.

Except when they are marketed specifically as “trade books,” philosophical monographs, too, are rarely reviewed in newspapers. Philosophers are confined to academia, writing mostly for each other, in a style increasingly inaccessible to non-specialists.

“And that is the real issue,” Gioia writes, of poets:

The poetry subculture no longer assumes that all published poems will be read. Like their colleagues in other academic departments, poetry professionals must publish, for purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy. … Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.

Publish or perish, work uncited and unread: the same complaints are heard across academia, as in philosophy, where Rogers Albritton, Sydney Morgenbesser, and even John Rawls, could not be tenured now. “The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work,” Gioia concludes. “It's just a bad place for all poets to work.” Might the same be true of philosophers?

Gioia’s essay is not a valediction: he is not here to bury poetry, but to praise it. He wants to show that poetry matters and to pitch strategies for saving it. Here, the parallel with philosophy may prove useful. Can we borrow Gioia’s tactics?

The details of his diagnosis are not encouraging, at first. One of the key problems, for Gioia, is the relative absence of critical reviews: the poetic in-crowd are too friendly. He quotes the poet Robert Bly:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, “I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself,” … but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.

Whatever the merit of this argument, it does not shed light on philosophy, where criticism has been, if anything, unduly harsh—and where it remains routine. I’m not convinced that we need philosophers who write about their peers like this:

Listen, for example, to Randall Jarrell's description of a book by the famous anthologist Oscar Williams: it “gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.” That remark kept Jarrell out of subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. Or consider Jarrell's assessment of Archibald MacLeish's public poem America Was Promises: it “might have been devised by a YMCA secretary at a home for the mentally deficient.”

Many of Gioia’s practical edicts do not smoothly carry over to philosophy. They include: reciting other people’s work in public readings; including prose as well as verse; pursuing higher standards and ruthless critique.

Gioia goes deeper, I think, both diagnostically and prescriptively, in a sequel to “Can Poetry Matter?” published fifteen years later. “Poetry as Enchantment” begins with three facts about poetry: that it’s the oldest literary art form; that it’s a human universal; and that “poetry originated as a form of vocal music.” Poetry was sung, not spoken, before it was written down.

It’s a chastening reminder. When I floated a definition of poetry here, I focused on its textual form, channeling Jeremy Bentham:

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

This definition needs refinement, but it’s surprisingly versatile, disconnecting poetry from the accidents of rhyme and rhythm. And yet it makes no sense at all for verse that is not written down.

According to Gioia: “For thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently, it was immensely popular.” Things changed with the New Critics, who introduced “close reading” to the US: a rigorous, analytical, detached, and not especially enjoyable way of engaging with verse.

The work of these critics represented a great moment in American intellectual history. Yet their immense success also had an enduring negative impact on the pedagogy of poetry.

At the same time, the New Critics professionalized poetry reading and paved the way for the explosion of “theory,” further alienating the common reader.

One could dispute this historical narrative, finding more pleasure in close reading, and more continuity with poetic appreciation, than Gioia admits. But his prescription makes sense: we can rejuvenate poetry, he suggests, by returning to the sonic. As Chair of the National Endowment of the Arts from 2003-9, Gioia established Poetry Out Loud, a recital competition for high schoolers. In 2024, over 160,000 students participated, memorizing, reciting, and listening to tens of thousands of poems.

Philosophy is not poetry. It aims for demystified truth, not enchanted polyphony; and it has a different place for technical tools and specialized research. But it shares the contrast between live performance—philosophical dialogue—and published text.

Hence Gioia’s directive, adapted to philosophy: it’s not enough to produce books for general readers, or recorded conversations—one must go out into the agora, Socrates-style, philosophizing with, not at or for, the people.