Dana Gioia: evaluation

Transcript context

…Putting yourself aside, where were the conservative poets today? Why is there not a modern T.S. Eliot or Cummings? There’s three ways of saying conservative. Is it conservative politics, is it conservative aesthetics, is it a conservative cultural vision? There was an avant-garde composer named Lou Harrison and he had his motto which was, “Consider, [cherish], conserve, create.” The whole notion seems to me of art is of conservation, of looking at all the achievements of the past and figuring out what it is we save and what it is that we need to add to move forward. The trouble with that in terms of academic culture is that there’s one or two trendy ways that they think are important because they generate work that validates you for promotion and for tenure versus having real deeper cultural values. The really great poets who are conserving culture, and one of the greatest ones just died, a fellow named Richard Wilbur. What you felt with Wilbur when you are reading these wonderful poems that everything that was worthwhile and usable in the past somehow found a place in these poems. I think that’s what it is in the same way you would not in mathematics or science or economics throw out everything before you. You would take it and you would build on it to make something that was meaningful for the moment. Elliot had suggested that Virgil was the first poet to, in some aesthetic sense, actually belong to the Christian world. Do you agree?…

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