Poetry as Enchantment: And Other Essays, by Dana Gioia. Paul Dry, 2024, 272 pages, $21.95, paper.

Poet Dana Gioia is a member of the school of New Formalism, a movement coinciding with Gioia’s departure from the business world in 1992 to become a fulltime poet. This new quest for formal poetic discipline sought to bring traditional verse forms back to the fore, standing in stark contrast to much of the Modernist poetry that dominated the twentieth century. Although he occasionally writes in free and blank verse, he is known primarily for his formal work. He is also an enthusiastic promoter for the new forms of poetry recitation that have emerged in recent decades, especially among the young. His work as a teacher and critic is equal to his poetic craftsmanship and expertise, all of which shines in Poetry as Enchantment.

The initial essay, “Poetry as Enchantment,” from 2015 is a stand-alone piece of critical brilliance. Gioia is addressing an aspect of poetic commentary that has been rarely discussed—enchantment.

The book is a collection of miscellaneous essays organized in three parts. One of its fascinating features is Gioia’s penchant for discovering treasures that are unknown to readers or largely forgotten. Examples would be the narrative poetry of Robert Frost, the war poet John Allen Wyeth, and Jack Foley’s Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline: Poets and Poetry 1940–2005.

Part 1, “Essays” on poetry, contains the lead essay which I will major on. Here Gioia discusses the place of enchantment in poetry, which has rarely been explored. The essay attempts to examine a current (2015) “misapprehension about the nature of poetry” (5). Poetry is the most ancient and thus primal form of all literature. Prior to writing and printing, poetry in its oral form remembered, preserved, and transmitted cultural identity (5). Robert Frost insisted that poetry is “a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget” (6). Poetry began as vocal music or verse (7). The bardic performance was meant to “cast a spell,” affecting the audience to remember and pass the poem down to the next generation.

Virgil, Milton, and Yeats all understood the poet to be a tribal singer (8). The biblical psalmist David was a singer of poetry. Originally a sonnet denoted a song or a ballad in French. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously said, “Singing is being” (9). Accenting the orality of poetry Gioia observes, “The physicality of poetic speech separates it from the conceptual language of philosophy” (10). Due to the musical aspect of poetic language, “T. S. Eliot observed about Dante that ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’” (11). Gioia sites William Blake’s “The Tyger” as an example.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

While the “magical aspect of poetry does not diminish the value of critical scrutiny,” the power of such a poem is in its vivid description of experience, not the explanation of a theory of experience (12).

“The Latin word for poetry, carmen, is also the word the Romans used for a song, a magic spell, a religious incantation, or a prophecy—all verbal constructions whose auditory powers can produce a magical effect on the listener.” Our word charm is from the Norman French, meaning the power to enthrall (12). Poetry confined to the classroom underestimates the importance of this power. Academics often pan the amateur response to poetry, but, as Gioia observes,

However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary. (15)

In a statement reminiscent of Robert Frost, Gioia opines, “Poetry gave humanity the words to get through life” (16).

Poetry is a distinct kind of language, different from ordinary speech. Its meaning and pneumonic power are channeled through enchantment. Donald Hall said, “I came to poetry for the sound it makes” (17). Gioia’s reflections in this essay are seasoned with the aphorisms of other poets and his own. Franz Kafka said poetry is “the axe to break the frozen sea within us.” Poetry addresses the intellect, the senses, the intuition, and the imagination all at once, whereas analysis takes things apart (18).

In the fifth section of this seven-part essay, Gioia asks, “Why is poetry so unpopular today?” One explanation is that electronic media distance us from experience of the world and its inhabitants. Also, for centuries past, education meant to become “well versed.” Poetry was taught for enjoyment. It reinforced every subject as the term “well versed” hints (20). “Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, and Kipling were international figures who outsold their prose competitors” (21). Poetry was everywhere.

Now the New Critics such as Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, John Crow Ransom, and Yvor Winters sought to change the way poetry was taught and understood. But unwittingly their more sophisticated methods, in reaction to what they viewed as Victorian sentimentality, “reduced the appeal of the art.” They had departed from the more “eclectic, performative, and auditory” pedagogy of a half century earlier (23). This radically academic turn made poetry “more remote from the actual holistic, intuitive experience of poetry” (24). While critical analysis has its place, students were missing the power of oral recitation since memorization had long ago disappeared from the classroom. Poetry had become imprisoned in the academy.

Gioia recounts his experience of asking students at Sarah Lawrence College to memorize Shakespearean sonnets. Initial resistance and awkwardness in recitation gave way to the realization that poetry was actually written to be spoken aloud (27–28). When Gioia became the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003, he sought to reignite interest in poetry by initiating local, state, and national poetry recitation competitions. State arts education experts resisted with four major objections. They claimed that students hated poetry (telling more about what the experts thought of poetry); memorization stifled creativity; competition has no place in the arts; and poetry is too intellectual for the average student (29).

The poetry recitation competition, “Poetry Out Loud was a huge and immediate success. . . . Students actually liked poetry once they took it off the page.” Sound and performance provided the perfect introduction to the art (30). Half of the winners were first-generation Americans. “[M]emorizing and reciting poetry provided them with powerful means of assimilating and mastering English. Poetry proved educationally effective, just as it had for thousands of years when it was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric” (31).

Thus, Gioia makes the case for a better way of teaching poetry. Recognizing the power of enchantment through memorization and recitation engages student imaginations and lays the groundwork for analysis (32). Teachers also need to recognize

non-conceptual forms of knowledge, which are fundamental to all literature, especially poetry. There are physical and sensory modes of meaning embedded in the rhythms, images, and verbal texture of verse, as well as emotional and intuitive movements in the structure of poetry (33).

Gioia concludes: “In poetry intellectuality without physicality becomes dull and barren, just as intuition untethered by intellect quickly becomes sloppy and subjective” (34).

I chose to review this book because Gioia has been on the vanguard of reviving a love of poetry in our time. He has been the best contemporary encouragement in my own poetic endeavors. This essay, in my opinion, is in line with the great apologies for poetry summed up in Gioia’s concluding quote. Consider these worthy of your attention: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) by John Dryden; A Defence of Poetry (An Apologie for Poetry, 1595 / 1581) by Sir Philip Sidney; “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (1800 / 1802) by William Wordsworth.

I will only briefly touch on the contents of the rest of the book, which is a somewhat random collection of essays. I hope merely to whet your appetite.

“Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford” explores Gioia’s own early education and encounter with poetry. The professor at Stanford University who inspired him while Gioia was a business major was the now almost forgotten poet Donald Davie, considered one of the great poets of his twentieth-century generation. This nascent period in Gioia’s development engendered the strong conviction that he would always write poetry for “the intelligent common reader,” i.e., not for the academic specialists (37). As a fellow Christian, Davie offered a Christian rapprochement in the world of poetry. This was refreshing to Gioia.

The third of four essays in Part 1, “Robert Frost and the Modern Narrative Poem” (76–97), is outstanding, as Gioia demonstrates the brilliance of Frost’s development of narrative poetry, a tightly woven poem of common speech. He was an innovator with his North of Boston in 1914. This was prior to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and others. Gioia observes that “North of Boston stands as one of the first fully achieved Modernist masterpieces in American poetry” (93).

Part 2, “Short Takes,” is a brief analysis of individual poets. He looks at well-known poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Phillip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, and W. H. Auden. He also looks at lesser or almost unknown poets: Samuel Menashe, Weldon Kees, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and concludes with an essay on “The Last of the Great Quarterlies: Frederick Morgan and the Hudson Review.” Of Larkin, Gioia wisely concludes with an assessment that could be applied to many modern poets: “The reason to read Larkin is that his work, like all great poetry, transcends the virtues and vices of its creator and lives as a special form of language that invites and rewards sustained attention” (146).

Amongst Gioia’s short takes is an anthologist of poetry, Garrison Keillor, whose comments on what makes good poetry suit Gioia’s own ideal—poetry that makes everyman sing. “Heaney in Hades: Seamus Heaney’s Virgil” explores poetic translation. The penultimate essay on great poetry quarterlies is a fascinating historical romp. The concluding essay of Part 2, “Auden at 100,” is a Gioia tour de force. “Unlike other Modernists (the Apollonian Wallace Stevens, for instance), Auden’s poems didn’t seem forbiddingly literary. . . . They came through the ear and went to the heart. . . . As Robert Frost said, ‘All the fun is how you say a thing’” (208–9). “Fun and musicality are essential virtues for poetry.” The brilliance of Auden’s great mind is evident because he “recognizes, investigates, and reconciles the evident contradictions of existence” (213). This reminds me of the biblical realism of Ecclesiastes.

Over the years when students would ask how they could begin to enjoy poetry, I would have them listen to the short YouTube, black and white documentary film “Night Mail.” Auden’s poem narrates the importance of human communication via the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway’s postal train’s trip from London’s Euston Station to Scotland. It perfectly illustrates Gioia’s main theme that poetry addresses the intellect, the senses, the intuition, and the imagination all at once. Students were always impressed.

Part 3 explores the West Coast influence on recent poetry and literature. He explores the reasons for the influence of Ray Bradbury, whose literary power was overlooked by the establishment for much of his life. Gioia observes, “They have forgotten that literature once had resonance outside the English Department” (228). They were unprepared for the resonant popularity of Bradbury.

Gioia reveals another almost unknown Oakland poet, Jack Foley. Not only was he a fine poet, but his two-volume chronicle of California poets from 1940 to 2005 is unique and invaluable. In my early days as a poet, I frequented the same Harvard Square bookstore that Gioia did, The Grolier Book Shop, run by the eccentric Gordon Cairnie. He would curtly shoo students away who were looking for textbooks. The shop was decorated with autographed black and white photos of all the modern great poets. On my honeymoon in 1973, Robin and I stopped in to say hello. Gordon gave us The Modern Poets: An American-British Anthology edited by John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read. My “Pocket Poets Series” copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems with an introduction by Williams Carlos Williams was purchased at The Grolier Book Shop, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge, Mass.

Gioia’s essay reminded me that many of my 1960s luminaries were from California or were published in California. Many of the poetry books I bought during that decade were published by New Directions Publishing, connected to the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021). So even if the poet was not from California, or even the twentieth century, the fact that their work was published or republished in California revealed the centrality of California’s influence on the Beat and Modernist poets of the twentieth century.

The penultimate essay in the volume is a revealing portrait of Los Angeles as Gioia’s literary home. For Gioia it was his home because of the presence of so many cultural giants, such as Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Jasha Heifitz, and Thomas Mann; literary giants such as Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss). He lists and counters five typical objections to the idea that LA has any cultural street cred.

Gioia concludes the volume with a reflection on the state of poetry in 2018. The young (ages eighteen–twenty-four) seem attracted to poetry more than other segments of the population (261). “As elite culture has less use for poetry, popular culture has embraced it” (265). I am working to be as enthusiastic as he is when he concludes, “The poetry scene isn’t a cemetery; it’s a crowded, noisy maternity ward” (269).

For an eclectic coverage of the contemporary poetic landscape stretching into the last century, there is no better book than this.

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, November–December, 2026