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 …
