Is Poetry Dead?

In one of his last and most famous poems, Bertolt Brecht expressed his wish for how posterity would view his poetry:

AUF EINEN CHINESISCHEN THEEWURZELLÖWEN

Die Schlechten fürchten deine Klaue.
Die Guten freuen sich deiner Grazie.
Derlei
Hörte ich gern
Von meinem Vers.

TO A CHINESE TEA-ROOT-LION

Bad men are terrified of your claws.
Good men marvel at your grace.
This
Is what I’d like to hear people
Say about my verse.

Brecht could not envision a world where good men OR  bad men would not read poetry, where poetry had lost its readers – and therefore its relevance.  The American poet August Kleinzahler sets us straight on the current state of affairs: 

Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them […]. Nor will their lives be diminished by not standing in front of a Cézanne at the art museum or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.

I suspect the figure is much higher than ninety percent.  But we should remember that it was not always so in America.  Poetry was an important part of cultural life, with the daily newspapers printing poems – often on page one – that were actually read.  After the assassination of President Lincoln, the nation turned to Walt Whitman for healing, and huge crowds attended his public readings.  In the depths of the Great Depression thousands would turn out to hear tiny Edna St. Vincent Millay read her poetry, and Millay’s collections were exchanged as treasured gifts on birthdays and weddings. Even the most powerful politicians would acknowledge the power of poetry: Robert Frost recited his Gift Outright at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, and Kennedy would write (or at least put his name on) a moving eulogy when Frost died shortly thereafter. Poetry was then part of our civic life, so when Robert Lowell refused to attend a White House event hosted by President Johnson in protest for Johnson’s Vietnam war policy, it was reported on the front page of the New York Times.  Poets mattered, as did their poems.

The heroic age of American poetry ended with Lowell’s death in 1977. SInce then, poetry has vanished from public life and is practiced at university campuses.  Poets write for – and are read by – each other; their words never seep into the national consciousness.  When a group of poets protested the Iraq War in 2003 by refusing to attend a tea at the White House with First Lady Laura Bush, their action went unnoticed, or was the subject of scorn and derision by the Wall Street Journal.  The Web site  Poets Against the War now has more that 20,000 poems, but the poems will never be read by anyone in power, nor by the ninety percent that Kleinzahler mentions.  The words sit there in lonely cyberspace, a sad testimony to the abjectness and irrelevance of poetry today.