I remember wondering whether poetry can matter anymore when I came across Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" (The Atlantic, May 1991). The essay gave me a lot to think about, and it gained him considerable recognition. It places poetry in a purgatorial state within American culture and calls for concrete actions that arts program administrators, teachers, and poets can take to rescue poetry from the analysis paralysis of academics.
Before recommending those practical steps, Gioia writes this sentence:
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
Before recommending those practical steps, Gioia writes this sentence:
The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains.What makes this 37-word sentence so interesting is the imbalance of its two propositions:
- The first proposition is 15 words, and the second is 10.
- The first is structured in subject-verb order (arts + will continue), and the second suspends the subject (possibility) and verb (remains) between two prepositional phrases.
- The first begins with a field (the arts), and second begins with a supposition (some possibility).
- The first ends with a noun (specialties), and the second ends with a verb (remains).
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
- Part 1: James Baldwin on Artists
- Part 2: Stanley Karnow on the Vietnam Memorial
- Part 3: Steven Pinker on Human Progress
- Part 4: Martin Luther King Jr. on Injustice
- Part 5: Andrew Sullivan on Religious Fundamentalism
- Part 6: Carl Sagan on the Environment
- Part 7: Harold Bloom on Shakespeare
- Part 8: Richard Bradley on Openers
- Part 9: T. S. Eliot on Dante
- Part 10: Edward Albee on Carson McCullers
- Part 11: John Donne on Immortality
- Part 12: William Styron on Robert Penn Warren
- Part 13: Robert Hass on Rainer Maria Rilke
