Can Poetry Matter?

Can Poetry Matter?  Essays on Poetry and American Culture by Dana Gioia, 257 pages

Decades ago, Dana Gioia educates us, poetry was a popular art.  Today, despite a wealth of venues and publications devoted to poetry, that is not the case.  More new poetry is being written than at perhaps any time in history, but little of it is being read, and that which is read is read primarily by other poets and academics, two categories with considerable overlap.  Once the queen of the literary genres, poetry has become confined to a subcultural ghetto, and one significantly smaller than those of science fiction or romance.  This is a double loss - for just as poetry is impoverished by its isolation, so too society loses what only poetry can provide.

The most convincing answer Gioia gives to the title question (though not, perhaps, the best) is his own evident love of poetry - not a stale appreciation but a true passion which inspires the reader to immediately seek out Jeffers or Kees or Kooser or any of the other unjustly obscure poets he celebrates.