Dana Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…Towards the end of that novel, he has a dialogue with Augustus, the Emperor. Let’s say you’re that poet, you’re on or near your deathbed, and you’re having a dialogue with Augustus. What do you tell Augustus? Thank God you were here and not Caligula. [laughs] Augustus is that brief moment where you think that the Roman imperial system might work, and Augustus, much more than our rulers today, understood the cultural power of art. Postmodernists, they defame Augustus, they defame Virgil, Horace, think that they were pawns into imperial power, but I think Augustus had a broader vision as did Virgil which is to say, if you can give people a common story, it unifies them. A culture, in order to keep together an empire, a nation in order to keep together, has to have certain common myths that express, convey the values, not in intellectual terms, but in terms of story, emotion, image. I know you’re a big admirer of Auden as a poet and a writer. He once said and I quote, “Opera is the last refuge of the high style in poetry.” True or false?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.