Poetry and Elitism

Dana Gioia, the current president of the National Endowment for the Arts, is probably the most visible representative of a movement in English poetry of the last few decades dubbed Formalism or New Formalism. The main unifying motive of this rather vague grouping of contemporary poets is the revival of meter and rhyme in serious poetry, certainly a valuable endeavor after all the damage that has been done since Walter the White Man took an ax to the English Muse. In Gioia's eyes, however, one of the main culprits in this has been the inability of contemporary poetry to be popular enough (a rather general expression of this thesis can be found in his 2007 Stanford commencement address). Although Gioia lays some blame on the failure of American education to establish cultured readership, his usual object of declamation is academic elitism.

Now, it may be that I would agree with Mr. Gioia if we broke things down, but it seems to me most unfortunate to associate a current disaster for good literature (the taste of the modern academy) with a necessary precondition of it (elitism). In fact, although serious poets are still a sort of elite within society itself, the problem with their verse is a democratization of aesthetic, whose causes must be found farther back than even the last century. By democratization of aesthetic I mean, essentially an aesthetic that falls easily in line with the dominant ideologies of bourgeois democracy and modern capitalism: self-expression and empowerment (as well as the consequent rejection of tradition and authority), a lack of artifice, and the exaltation of the mundane. Democratization of aesthetic, when taken to extremes, as it has been for about the last century by various avante-garde movements, cannot produce acceptable art; to me, this is a self-evident fact. It should not surprise us then that for a long time artists have had to redefine the critical vocabulary to make their innovations "good," even to the point of institutionalizing redefinition itself as a virtue.

The most interesting consequence of this democratization, however, is that the people (the demo- of democracy) didn't react very well to its first manifestations, and have responded to its establishment with the disinterest Mr. Gioia so often laments. It is this strange twist which has led to the intellectual elite (a social element that will probably always exist) supporting a popular aesthetic, although disliked by the people, solely because the value of that aesthetic are more in line with the generally dominant ideology, itself popular, vulgar, and, to bring in the Greek analogue of those terms, democratic. It can only be with democracy as the ruling ideology that the poets are noble while the poems are base.

Mr. Gioia is fighting an uphill battle in the poetic world, and he seems to have used his time at the NEA well, especially in being vociferous about humanizing public schools which often nowadays lack any real instruction in music or the arts. I admire his efforts, although I think they will eventually change little: the contemporary arts can be revived only by the most minimal compromises with the aesthetics of democracy, and, for all their good intentions, New Formalists like Mr. Gioia aren't really radicals in any direction.