Democracy Culture and the Voice of Poetry

Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry

At some point, all of us must have asked ourselves: Does poetry still have a place in the contemporary democratic society? Other questions arise from here of course: Does poetry play different roles in the different democracies? What is the difference between the role poetry plays in the American society and the role it plays in the European one? And from here on it may start the debate.

In the book, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, by Robert Pinsky, we may find some answers to these questions.

Robert Pinsky starts in the first chapter "Culture" considering the "voice of poetry"..."within the culture of American democracy." He remarks that the human society fears the most often since its early ages from the important things: the uniformisation, by globalization, centralization, loss of diversity and the possibility of disappearing from the collective memory. An American poet says Pinsky, "embodies a single, in fact familiar, anxiety: that of being cut off from memory - forgotten"

In his consideration of the separation of the individuals vs. undifferentiation, Robert Pinsky analysis Alexis Tocqueville's ideas about democracy and about life in the United States. Tocqueville is radical when considering life of a man in a democracy like the American one. He thinks that as the most anti-poetic thing of all. Further, Tocqueville explores what it have become of the old sources of inspiration for poetry, coming to the conclusion that the whole undivided attention of the poet and that of the reader is going to be fixed on man and man alone, after having passed through a transitory faze when having focused on nature with its "physical and inanimate objects."

According to Tocqueville, "the principle of equality does not, then, destroy all the subjects of poetry: it renders them less numerous, but more vast." Pinsky finds that Tocqueville's words could be those of a prophet when predicting the future of the American culture.

At some point, Pinsky declares his intentions of studying the relation between poetry and the American reader rather than between it and the American poet. In order to do this he tells us about the "Favorite Poem Project" and about the surprising amount of answers he and his co-workers received when they addressed to the potential poetry readers.

By this project Pinsky also intended to reveal something in the way poetry relates to the mass culture in the United States and also weather the latter includes some poetry in its ways of expression.

Reading and listening to the simple people that were talking about the meanings their favorite poem had and about what it revealed for them, Pinsky says that he understood what "the voice of poetry" really meant. Every man and every woman understood the ideas and the images evoked by each poem not really as what its author meant but as what the lines of the poem revealed to their soul when reading it. So, the author of this book comes to the conclusion that poetry remains one of the few arts that addresses to the individual and that does not contribute to raising robots that react the same way to the same stimuli.