Poetry in an Age of Diminishing Life in Public
What on earth, you might be thinking, is a journalist doing talking about poetry? Poets have a great deal to teach journalists about language, but what might a journalist have to say to poets?
What I have to say is this: journalists write about life in public, and what they write shapes the sort of conversation that is—or should be—the circulatory system that sustains the life we have in common as members of a church, a community, a society, a nation, indeed as members of the human race. Can and should poets do the same?
To set the stage, I am going to invoke Dana Gioia. I first encountered him in the pages of The Atlantic around 1990 through his still resonant essay, Can Poetry Matter? In it, he pointed to the proliferation of graduate programs in poetry; taught by poets, for apprentice poets, attached to universities that also publish books and anthologies of poetry; plus the numerous small magazines that publish poetry read by other poets, teachers of poets and their students. All of which led him to declare: “Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet.”
Ah, but Dana was setting us up. His real subject was the decline of poetry outside its sequestered, mostly academic circle of producers and consumers. Little of it reached the public at large, he argued, and less and less of it was being reviewed in the pages of The New York Times Book Review or The Atlantic itself. My own magazine, Newsweek, was the last general-interest magazine to employ a poet—John Ashbury, no less—but only as an art critic. What Dana did not say, being a polite fellow, is how much of this sequestered poetry was dull and academic, and especially lacking the music that makes language sing.
The title essay of his next book, Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, published in 2004, opens with grim statistics. Fewer and fewer Americans were reading anything more serious than labels; they were spending four hours a day watching television and another three listening to the radio. Why, then, was Gioia upbeat, almost giddy?
Because, he asserted, the end of print culture—in effect, the end of reading culture—had allowed poetry to recover its oral roots. As evidence he pointed to the syncopated sounds of rap music, the performance of poetry slams and other manifestations of an “auditory avant-garde” erupting outside the academy as well as off the printed page. Recitations were happening in nonprofit bookstores and other locales besides the university—proof, Gioia believed, that poetry had acquired a new purchase on American public life.
Whatever one might make of that argument—and I admit I was not persuaded—we are now living in a very different social configuration. Between 2020 and 2022, the COVID epidemic and the government’s response to it, redrew the boundaries between private and public life. But other powerful social forces were—and very much remain—at play.
And so, my theme can be stated as a question to poets, aspiring poets, and poetry-lovers: What is the place of poetry in a time of diminishing public life? Or to put it more precisely, in a time of diminishing life in public, which of necessity we share with strangers and well as colleagues and friends—those we find incompatible as well as compatible.
I want to frame this inquiry with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville from the second volume of his monumental Democracy in America, published in 1840. Among the many things this French Catholic aristocrat found attractive about American society there was this rather dour observation of the consequences of the American emphasis on individualism:
Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix with them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains to his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.
As a Catholic, de Tocqueville’s outlook was inherently communitarian. But in this passage we ought not overlook the echo—I would guess deliberate—of Mathew 3:13: “seeing they do not see, hearing they do not hear.”
Tocqueville is writing about urban public life as he found it a decade earlier during a ten-month tour that included New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, whose combined population was less than half a million souls. Today, those three cities are home to more than ten million—and that is not including their metro suburbs. Yet it seems to me his observations of two centuries ago aptly describe life in public in our own time.
I am not talking about the random violence, the carjackings, the retail theft vexing all our big cities, troubling as those things are. I am talking about our everyday interactions with the strangers with whom we share the public spaces outside our front doors.
What goes on inside our front doors has usually been considered more personal, more intimate—if not always more pleasurable—than what goes on outside them. Among strangers, different standards apply, different roles are assumed, different pleasures sought, even different clothes are worn. Or at least they used to be. Indeed, when the kind of warmth, trust, and openness of feeling that intimacy connotes is sought outside the home, marriages fray and families tend to fall apart.
What does it mean to be a public person? Back in 1977, Sociologist Richard Sennett published a highly detailed book, The Fall of Public Man, in answer to that question. Taking as his social ideal urban life in eighteenth-century London and Paris, Sennett presented public man—in those days, “public woman” carried very different connotations—as urbane, outward-looking and society-centered. He assumes public responsibilities and cherishes impersonal relationships by creating social conventions that allow personal expression without baring one’s soul.
But what happens to life in public when the social rituals and roles, the implicit rules and proprieties—in a word, the conventions that make engagement with strangers possible and life in public pleasurable—what happens when they atrophy or no longer exist? What happens is, public life as we have it today. Here are some obvious illustrations.
One of the longer-lasting social consequences of the Covid pandemic has been the massive shift from working with others in downtown buildings to working at home. We call it working remotely. But what is rendered remote is not just the office and our fellow workers but the whole, pulsating world outside our front doors. Despite the advantages this arrangement has for some workers, the overwhelming effect has been the diminishment of life in public.
Walk down 42nd Street in Manhattan from Madison Avenue to Times Square and you will see row on row of empty store and office windows. The same is true on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. There is far less chance on city streets these days of bumping into old friends, of buttonholing public figures, of enjoying diverting street life of any kind. The streets are not empty and most hotels are close to full. But all too often, the faces you prepare your face to meet are tourists you will never see again.
Shopping is not the same, either. Indeed, without the tourists many more department stores in cities like New York and Chicago would be shuttered. Shopping has always been a social as well as an economic activity, especially for women, who seem to have an extra shopping gene. Decades ago, suburban Chicago women made shopping at Marshall Field’s on State Street (now a Macy’s) a major social event that included lunch with friends in the Walnut Room. Of course, they wore their best for the occasion.
No longer. Today, stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, and Bloomingdale’s are, if anything, even more wondrously decorated with artful displays of fashionable wear. Yet the number of clerks behind the counters are few because the shoppers are few. And who can blame what clerks there are for forlornly staring at their cell phones? Why go out in public to shop when your fingers can do the walking on your computer, and Amazon will deliver purchases to your door?
I want to pause a moment here to consider a famous Parisian image, A Sunday on La Grande Jette by Georges Seurat, painted in 1884 (see: featured image of this essay). Notice how overdressed these folks seem to us. One can imagine them picking up their picnic baskets and strolling home via the Champs-Élysées and not feeling at all out of place.
Notice the deportment as well, and the overall sense of decorum; the observance, signaled by their highly stylized garments, of social conventions. All that is gone from American urban life. When the temperature is mild, what we see on display on our city streets is overexposed human flesh and precious little decorous covering: a let-it-all-hang-out personal statement that recognizes no difference between private and public space.
In his book, which was published thirty years before Steve Jobs gave us the first smartphone, Richard Sennett argues that conversation is the essence of life in public. For conversation, there were once coffeehouses and public squares, as well as markets of every sort, where news and gossip were traded and politics debated. “What news on the Realto?” Solanio asks in The Merchant of Venice.
During my forty-some years working in Manhattan, the same question reverberated in restaurants around Wall Street, in dining rooms at the Yale and Harvard Clubs off Madison Avenue, in the delis and on the sidewalks in the garment and diamond districts of Manhattan—and their iterations in other major cities. Wall Street is still there, but without the old conversational buzz, and the university clubs survive chiefly by renting out rooms to anyone willing to pay for them.
A lawyer friend recalls the professional camaraderie he once felt working in Chicago’s Loop. “I miss the old days when hundreds of lawyers would walk over to the courthouse for daily motion calls or status hearings. It was a preposterous waste of time from a cost/benefit perspective, but I loved sitting there, and learned a lot watching other lawyers perform, especially in federal court, because the entire world would come up before those federal judges on just one morning call. Now that sector of the Loop feels empty because many of the functions that drew lawyers to the courthouse are now done remotely by Zoom.”
The news media, I used to think, is what we have instead of Sennett’s eighteenth-century coffee houses and public squares. I got my start more than sixty years ago as editor of a weekly community newspaper that served mostly Black and lower-income white families in north Omaha. I was their eyes and ears, covering city council meetings and other local events so that my readers could be better informed. To serve a tiny, isolated Omaha neighborhood surrounded on three sides by Iowa, I recruited the local gossip. She could not write her name, but she could phone in once a week with all the news of her neighbors. Her column was a place for them to meet. Shortly after I departed Omaha for New York City and Newsweek, that weekly newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
In their heydays, Newsweek and TIME had devoted readers who relied on us every week to provide a wider range of fact-checked news and opinion. We were storytellers, producing what we were pleased to call “the first draft of history.” We were also information gatekeepers. And so were our competitors on television, which as late as 1970 consisted of just three networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, whose news anchors—does anyone recall Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley?—cultivated reputations for gravitas, integrity, and impartiality. They commanded listeners’ attention and respect as authoritative storytellers of our life together in public. All that is gone, now, or nearly so.
Thanks to the internet, we now live in an information-saturated age of influencers, Substack, podcasts, and algorithmic tailoring of the news to match the user’s preconceptions. It is my opinion against yours; insight, integrity, and expertise be damned.
And then there is the cell phone, ubiquitous as gnats and as necessary as bridges. Not long after cell phones appeared, public telephone booths disappeared. (Sorry about that, Clark Kent, you will have to find someplace else to change clothes.) Through our cells, we can now remain in touch via social media no matter where we are. But is social media really social?
We have all seen couples in a restaurant talking—not to each other but to someone else on their cells. We have all seen strangers on the street with clips or wires attached to their ears, talking and gesticulating to someone who, quite literally, is not there. These people are not really living in public; they are out but in their private worlds. As professional athletes like to put it, they are not “in the moment,” meaning they are not fully aware of who and what is going on around them. This is not life in public. It is being elsewhere together.
Of course, we cannot ban the use of cell phones, Zooming, and other technologies of remoteness from life in public, nor would anyone want to. Still: many parents and school boards rightly do pay attention to studies which find that half of American teenagers report being online almost all the time. Lives built on smartphones, tablets, and computers, Jonathan Haidt warns, will change their minds and hearts. More to my point: these same technologies have already reduced the public realm to words and images encountered on a screen.
To paraphrase Tocqueville: these social technologies allow us to mix with other citizens but see them not; to touch but feel them not; to maintain the sense of self solely within the circle of family and friends while having no sense of the self in relation to the larger community we call society. Yes, the internet is in many ways a godsend because it allows us access to athletic events, films, museums, and other civic and cultural institutions without leaving home. But home is not where public life is lived.
Where does the poet fit in all of this? Poetry is produced in private, most of it I assume, at home. Poetry—all poetry—is intensely personal because the language of every poem is shaped by the poet’s personal voice. In what sense, then, can we speak of public poetry—that is, poetry that speaks to and about our life as members of a public?
In a very general way, we can distinguish between public and private poets—or at least public and private poems. In the mid-nineteenth century, Walt Whitman wrote robustly public poetry as an American celebrating America itself, while another poet of the same period, Emily Dickinson, wrote very private poetry and rarely even left her bedroom. I can still recite lots of Dickinson by heart, but only a few lines of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas have stuck to my ribs.
That is because there is a difference between universal themes like Death—recall Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me”—and themes based on public life as it is at a given time. When asked, American poets have produced poems for ceremonial events, like Presidential inaugurations. This is poetry on demand: they are rarely worth remembering, or of the sort that their creators care to be remembered by.
Public poetry, the poet Lawrence Jacobs reminds me, is usually about place. Many of Larry’s own poems are about the world he knew growing up in Detroit. William Carlos Williams wrote lots of public poetry of this kind, but apart from Kenneth Rexroth, the Beat poets rarely did: their poems mostly celebrated spontaneity—being in the beatific drug or alcohol-influenced moment—although Ginsberg’s Howl, which I consider very much a period piece, was intended as a kind of anthem for the Vietnam War generation.
We know from biographies by Lyndall Gordon and others that T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, was rooted emotionally in his failing marriage—a deeply painful personal matter. But to this day we still look to The Wasteland as a wide-angle poetic rendering of Western culture in the disillusioned aftershock of World War I—the very definition of a public matter.
War and political oppression seem to provide the most fertile soil for producing public poetry. It also helps if you live in countries like Ireland, Poland, Russia, or Nicaragua, countries where people celebrate their poets, buy their books, and look to them to give voice to their suffering. At least that is their traditions. I am thinking of poems like William Butler Yeats’ Easter 1916.
I am also thinking of poets like Poland’s Zbigniew Herbert and the émigré Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz, of Nicaragua’s Ernesto Cardenal, and of the thousands of Russians who collected to hear recitations by poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and of the samizdat popularity of Joseph Brodsky, and other poets exiled by the Communists. This is poetry that is engaged with issues of profound moral concern to members of a particular public. And the best of this poetry is capable of producing pleasure long after the particular political circumstances have passed into history or irrelevancy.
To see what poetry like this looks like, let us very briefly examine the first stanza of W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1919, which is a masterful example of what I am talking about. The title refers to the date on which Hitler launched the Nazi invasion of Poland, thereby starting the Second World War. The invasion was also Hitler’s repudiation of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s strategy of appeasement, under which the British had guaranteed the independence of Poland.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
Auden was a British poet who had only recently migrated to the United States after living for some time in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, where he watched up close the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the opening line, you will see how he has begun to write using American idiom, which “dives” clearly is.
In the first two lines, Auden sounds almost like a foreign correspondent telling us exactly where he is: even when I first came to New York City, twenty-six years after Auden, 52nd Street was still world famous for its strip of jazz clubs. So the poem starts out in a very specific and public place, and the voice we hear is that of a public man who is about to introduce a subject of very grave public concern.
But then the poem suddenly becomes, on the one hand, more personal and emotional—the speaker tells us he feels “uncertain and afraid”—and on the other it expands the public sphere to the whole planet so as to root the poet’s emotions in very public, almost cosmic forebodings.
The phrase “clever hopes” refers to Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy, based on the hope that Hitler will not start a second world war. The poet dismisses Chamberlain’s decade-long strategy as “low and dishonest.” The cumulative effect, now, is “anger and fear” moving in waves, possibly including radio waves, across the whole planet. These, in turn, disturb our private lives to the point of obsession.
And then, Bang! Auden lets us have it. Our private lives have been disturbed by the horror of this public event because it brings “the odor of death”—an “unmentionable” word in polite conversation—that “offends” because it obtrudes on what would be a pleasant, private September night on the town in mid-Manhattan.
At this point, I want to do something that no one would allow in a class on poetry. I want to skip to the fifth and middle stanza simply because it nicely illustrates this evening’s theme of public versus private. Here is the stanza:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Here, after a stanza that ends with the words “international wrong,” we are back in a private place: the jazz joint on 56th street. But the first word of the second line, “Cling,” suggests a level of desperation in those who have come there, as does the repetition of “must.” The connection of “fort” with “furniture” makes plain that this home away from home is a place of escape from what is transpiring in the public world outside, an escape that allows them, at least temporarily, to forget the unfolding human catastrophe that no one, on this start of the Second World War, can escape.
And how might an American poet writing today capture the diminishment of life in public as I have described it? One way, surely, is to look at what happens—is happening—to life in public when citizens retreat into the sphere of their private interests, personal pleasures, and family pursuits? Already, we can see what happens.
Dark forces emerge to exploit the shrunken public sphere; to enrich the rich at the expense of the poor; to transform democracy into an executive kleptocracy, and in so doing soiling the Oval Office; to translate personal retribution into public policy, declare black is white and false is true because I, as the embodiment of the public will, say so.
What happens when a big country invades a small one, and our elected leaders call the latter the aggressor? When news is true only when it flatters those in political power? When a mob at presidential urging terrorizes the nation’s capital, and the assault on elected officials is hailed as patriotic? When members of that mob who caused police officers defending the Capitol are given a presidential pardon. When dinner in the White House dining room is for sale to anyone with a deal to make.
Finally, what does it say about our private as well as public lives, when half a nation blesses this moral and constitutional carnage? Poets, where are your pens?
EDITORIAL NOTE: These remarks were delivered as part of the 2025 University of Saint Thomas Summer Literary Series, a part of the MFA program in Creative Writing.