Poets on Poetry: The Morality of Poetry

Abstract

One of the great moral issues of our time is the place of poetry in our culture. The matter is so deeply embedded in the American mind, though, that most people are unaware that the situation even exists. These, as I see them, are the dimensions of the problem. The dominant mode of thinking in our culture is what Howard Gardner (1985), the psychologist, calls the logical-mathematical intelligence, first identified by Plato as abstract thinking, most acutely exemplified in the work of Piaget. Such an approach to thinking, so established in our culture and in our habitual way of knowing by the traditions of philosophic thought, rationalism, the scientific method, and simply by the ponderous weight of inertia, has become, even to those schooled in the study of literature, the basic and only way of knowing. Few teach poetry in the schools, but even those who do so accept without questioning a stance which views poems as secret messages, technical constructs. The approaches for breaking these linguistic messages are passed down indirectly by those professors and teachers who have been inducted into a cult only after years of unquestioning obedience and subservience. For these scribes, poems are indeed linguistic puzzles to be solved: they are intricate, arcane, and accessible to only a few people with special training and aptitudes. Although I was raised by disciples of New Criticism and initiated into the cult of formalism, I