From the poetry front

Abstract

As I write, it is Christmas Eve, the snow is falling, and Denise Levertov has died. Yesterday, I heard a taped interview with the poet: she described reading her poems at antiwar demonstrations, receiving letters of thanks from attendees suddenly turned on to poetry by her work, of young activists sallying forth equipped with knapsacks containing her poems. The frail voice of the elder poet evoked an era in which it seemed to many that poetry did-indeed was-political work, and that the audience reaction to poetry was tangible. But today, all the instruments agree that it is a dark, cold day for seriously entertaining such a notion. All the same, poets persist in doing so, as they have since the Renaissance. What has varied is the response of audiences and critics. The cold war hypostasization of a separation of spheres between poetry and politics seemed inadequate by the late 1970s, when it began to be acceptable in the American academy to consider the politics of canonical modern poets. By the early 1990s, more critics of modern U.S. poetry (such as Susan Schweik, Maria Damon, Cheryl Walker, Walter Kalaidjian, and Alan Golding) considered previously neglected figures, and did so in light of their politics. Nonetheless, the respectability of canonicity continues even for more radical critics, who often feel compelled to include a disclaimer apologizing for the lack of literary merit of the poems pre-