Customer Reviews

Why Poetry Matters (Why X Matters Series)

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I've come to poetry kind of late in my life. I attended a poetry reading in 2006 that woke me up and since then I've tried to backfill my knowledge and experience of poetry. Jay Parini's book wraps it all up for me, but I don't see why it wouldn't be a very helpful book for poets themselves. It covers a lot of ground but everything it says seems essential. You don't have to be a specialist to understand where he's going. His reasons for "why poetry matters" are clearly stated and backed up with interesting examples. I would think that teachers of English and literature at all levels could derive much value from this book. For me, it's just about the best single book I've found on the subject. There's a nice review of this book on [...] which is where I heard about it.

Jay Parini's new book is an elegant and insightful response to Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" His book not only argues persuasively for the role of poetry in contemporary society; it also provides a historical survey of poetry and ideas about poetry. Parini is as compelling in his discussions of Horace and Virgil as he is in his discussions of Frost and Eliot, Snyder and Gluck. His witty, clear-eyed prose makes his tour of western poetry both educational and entertaining. Anyone interested in poetry will learn from this book. Professors looking for a good introduction to poetry should order it for their classes. Henry Hart

This is a book for those who once loved poetry and let that love die from neglect. It is also a book for those who continue to have a life-long passion for the art, but need the reassurance that there are others out there in this tragically unpoetic time who share that passion. Imagine that time when poetry first entered your heart and vibrated through your whole being; for me it was a spring day in an open windowed elementry school classroom and my adored Language Arts teacher spoke the name "Shelley." The same sensation will return when you read this loving book. Buy it, read it, carry it with you (as I do)and open its pages when your soul needs some fresh air. It will not disappoint.

Parini's latest work is superb. His extensive knowledge of the poetic form shines through from beginning to end while his love of poetry and concise and easy to comprehend writing style makes this book a perfect companion for both the poet as well as the poetically challenged. The book not only explores the great poets of history, but also includes anecdotes afforded by Parini's deep knowledge of each poet and the events and lives that influenced them and their craft. As a person myself who once cursed poetry but now embraces it, I would recommend this book to poetry's critics and patrons alike.

Parini reminds us of two of poetry's great strengths: surprise and mystery. In the middle ages, a man's craft was also called his "mystery." Poetry matters because it can make us feel more fully alive to the mysteries of common life. We bring our own past to bear on poetry's metaphors to achieve a great consolation, a way to be sympathetic with another human being's private utterance. Of course this can be the aim of all arts, but it is especially true with poetry--and Parini tells us why. Poetry can remove the blinders in an age of media speak, sound bites, and rhetorical tricks. Poetry is language in its most pure state. The poet discovers the poem in a surprising way as he composes, and the reader recreates this experience during a close reading. The poem invites us to savor language. Mr. Parini stands up for poetry's importance. Every age, he reminds us, has had to do this from time to time. Mr. Parini shows how poetry can matter in our lives and in our children's classrooms. He shows us (through many examples of individual poems) that "poetry is a language adequate to our experience." Sadly, poetry will begin to matter less and less if we don't teach future generations to delight in its verbal discoveries. This book can serve as a preventive against that catastrophe.

Maybe I was spoiled in high-school and got a perfectly sound education in English composition and in poetry without really understanding how rare such an education is. Which is why I want to say if you want to know why poetry matters, go to your high-school English teacher; don't rely on a college professor's textook to tell you.

Because if you think a college professor, which is one of the hats Jay Parini wears, might give a better answer, you'd be very much mistaken.

Mr. Parini doesn't provide a better answer than what can be found in a perfectly sound high-school course in poetry. Instead, he provides you with a nose-to-the-grindstone, academic set of answers, replete with the conceptual and analytical tools for deconstructing T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (the last chapter in the book), for example, or for unquestionable assertions regarding how Wendell Berry's poetry comes out of the Miltonic pastoral tradition.

Talk about alienation by scientific abstraction! What about alienation by literary dissection to the point of dessication?

This book is so filled with textbook-type prose, it finally blows.

While it is lovely to learn that Jay Parini claims to view poetry as natural scripture, the book is more of a testimony to his love for the academic pulpit. I had no qualms at all with what he claims; I just found nothing new in any chapter from what was taught me in high-school nearly forty years ago. It's all quite familiar, staid, and unspectacular territory.

What ideas there are in this book differ in no way from what a sound and good high-school English teacher or library textbook can already give you. Read Ralph Waldo Emerson (just as Parini advises) and you're good to go. Really.

I don't understand why there needs to be yet another book on why poetry matters or one that explains what poetry is. That is to say, why does THIS BOOK matter at all when it's all been said before and not any better?

I was disappointed with the book and my purchase. When all the essential elements are finally covered and all the reasons why poetry matters are given, nothing is left for an afterglow. No deeper understandings were to be had than what one had imbibed from other teachers and other books long, long ago.

But on one more bright note, Jay Parini does advise the reader to read lots and lots and lots of poetry. (It is better advice to follow his suggestion than to buy this book -- unless you happen to like this overt intellectualizing over poetry or seek a really deep sleep.)

I found little loveliness in this text, nothing memorable or soulful to keep after my reading experience was finished and I had closed the back cover on this tome. I suspect the book would have carried an inspirational lift had the author not written so very much; it easily could have been a better book with some editing (deleting the last chapter, for example) and a tighter focus on the title topic.

Dana Gioia, a poet who has written a book on the topic of poetry matters now at least ten years old, did much better by way covering the essentials and enticing the reader to read and love poetry. Jay Parini, the poet, wasn't available, apparently, when the college professor in him took over and decided to write this book.

Why poetry matters is destined to remain merely a classroom issue is due to works just like this; they do nothing to empassion the reader to rescue poetics from the stale atmosphere of classrooms and the lecture hall.

The one chapter where one felt real passion behind the subject was Chapter 8, "The Natural World," where Mr. Parini nearly convinces the reader that any poet worth her or his salt is someone who is a totally devoted lover of nature. While such an assertion isn't wholly true, the chapter, nonetheless, is written powerfully enough to make you feel that it is true.

Graduate school-level undertakings of poetic exegisis do not enhance the reasons why poetry matters. They just cleverly exploit it by standardizing the answers already found in tradition, helping the matter of poetry to matter not one iota to the general public.

Besides, what's a secularist worth his salt doing talking about believing in the God of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" in the last chapter? Muddy, bloody mullarky that business was!

Poetry is art expressed in language, orally or in writing. Poetry matters because art matters. Art matters because art is entertainment and we all like to be entertained. Poetry, then, is entertainment, nothing more and nothing less. This is true regardless of the poet's intent or the qualities of the poetry.

Professor Parini's book starts as a playful stroll through fields of poetic theory but quickly bogs down in the old slough of literary criticism that implies a fund of esoterica is required to appreciate poetry. Already at page 72 we are treated to a disquisition on William Blake's "The Sick Rose." (Nobody has ever figured out what it means.) Later the reader is treated to erudite observations about T.S. Eliot.

To steal a term from the world of photography, this seems to me to be a "prosumer" book. It is written for consumers with some professional features. Some will enjoy it. I didn't. If you are considering buying the book, don't judge it by the cover or the opinions on the jacket. Read at least a few pages after the introduction to see what you are getting.