Dana Gioia, The Poet in the Age of Prose

Here is some of Dana Gioia'a The Poet in an Age of Prose from Can Poetry Really Matter, Graywolf, 2002.

Regarding the New Critics: "The older generation of formalists came to maturity during World War II, and their emergence as writers coincided with the postwar period of American cultural ascendance. The intellectual assumptions behind their word reflect the ebullient confidence of America’s new international dominance…they were determined to meet the Old World on equal terms by demonstrating their mastery of its traditional modes of discourse…they assumed—as a central ideological foundation—the reader’s deep familiarity with traditional literature…they wrote poems that displayed their full command of the traditions of English literature, informed and energized by international Modernism…Their word was intellectually demanding, aesthetically self-conscious, emotionally detached, and intricately constructed. Their audience was, by definition, limited to fellow members of the academy’s intellectual and artistic elite." 227

"The New Formalists emerged in less optimistic and assumptive times. They came to maturity in the cultural disintegration of the Vietnam era…What the New Formalists—and their counterparts in music, art, sculpture, and theater—imagined was a new imaginative mode that took the materials of popular art—the accessible genres, the genuinely emotional subject matter, the irreverent humor, the narrative vitality, and the linguistic authenticity—and combined it was the precision, compression, and ambition of high art." 227-8

"The new sensibility also has led to the return of verse narrative, the exploration of popular culture for both forms and subjects, the rejection of avant-garde posturing, the distrust of narrowly autobiographical thematics, the unembarrassed employment of heightened popular speech, and the restoration of direct, unironic emotion. Seen from this perspective, the movement might be more accurately described by the alternative term Expansive poetry. This expression captures the eclectic interests and broad cultural ambitions of the movement." 226

Regarding the specific discomfort of critics with popular culture in New Formalist poetry: "Unlike the actual audiences for popular art, they view it generically in abstract terms—often with an unconscious element of professional condescension…the notion that serious artists would employ popular forms in an unironic, undetached, and apolitical manner leaves these au courant theorists nor merely dumbfounded but embarrassed." 229