Conclusion

Modern Poetry as a Symbolic Form

The Self and Fragments of Time

Works of art owe much of their meaning to a form of fetishism. When the illusio shatters, when the collective belief that attributes spiritual content to certain images or texts breaks down, the works are reduced to inert, tautological objects, to mere res devoid of hidden meanings.¹ This need for credit is all the more necessary the more the works move away from common sense and from the languages considered valuable by the average educated public and tradition, as happens with the dehumanized art of the last hundred and fifty years. A visitor to a museum of contemporary art who regards the collection with the gaze of someone unfamiliar with the web of hidden meanings that invest those objects with value understands just how thick the patina of implicit conventions can be.² The same thing happens in some areas of modern poetry. If we were to ignore for a moment the assumptions that allow us to attribute a meaning to these texts, the credit granted to modern poetry could even seem excessive. Why give so much importance to these brief subjective fragments? Why do schools and scholars devote so much time and social energy to the study of “The Infinite,” a text of only fifteen lines that, unlike War and Peace, Middlemarch, or In Search of Lost Time, contains so little experience?

The primary meaning of modern poetry’s symbolic form lies in the answer to these questions: evidently only an individualistic society can attach so much weight to an art that conveys to readers a markedly subjective view of the world through its content and, even before that, its style. The egocentrism of modern poetry has no equivalent in any other literary form, not even in autobiography after Rousseau. Autobiographers are accustomed to situating personal content more or less obviously in a suprapersonal context, to telling the story in a prose not far removed from the language of ordinary communication, and to placing the first-person story in a time and space that are meant to be objective and in the midst of other people. Poets of recent centuries, on the other hand, use a style far removed from degree-zero writing that can ignore altogether whatever transcends or goes beyond the self: while the narrative form is made to show circumstances (etymologically, “what surrounds” individuals),³ modern poetry can safely ignore them. No limits are placed on the speaker, because once the link with premodern ritualism had fallen away, the poem’s form was interpreted as the author’s expression.

The image of the world conveyed to the reader by most modern poems is a narcissistic one. I use this term with in the sense that Christopher Lasch gives it.⁴ As an existential attitude, narcissism is characterized by the idea that meaning is not to be sought in the encounter with the outside world or with others but by protecting oneself from centrifugal passions, by shifting energy away from human relationships, and by trying to “be oneself” or, at most, by “expressing oneself.” The lyric center and the periphery occupied by pure poetry emanate a manifestly narcissistic image of the world: in lyric texts, the speaker describes subjective content in a form charged with expressivism; in pure poetry, the voice programmatically distances itself from the prose of ordinary life and from the common way of experiencing it. But, as we have seen, by now even narrative or essay poetry, which would appear to have different characteristics, is equally caught in subjective estrangement. Two centuries of antilyric long poems have failed to tarnish readers’ commonsense idea that the mimetic genre of modern literature is the novel and not verse writing.

The vision of reality crystallized in modern poetry seems to be crossed by two deep cuts. The first, the most visible one, is the self’s isolation, the interruption of the social bond that unites individuals in systems of mutual dependence, externally and internally; the second, less visible but equally important, is the interruption of the chronological bond that unites the instants of life in an abstract continuity captured by narrative in the form of plot. The poetry of the last two centuries, emphasizing a drift inherent in the structure of the lyric form, tends to reproduce the instantaneous and epiphanic nature of subjective monologue, as if the fragmentation had spread within experience itself, separating a few moments of meaningful life from the senseless course of a destiny that is perpetually the same. The image of the world conveyed by the ideal type of modern poetry is contrary to the image we usually associate with that of the nineteenth-century novel: on the one hand, a supposedly objective mimesis of social bonds, fashioned in the conviction that ordinary life is full of meaning and acquires its own significance thanks to the plot, that is, to a web of relationships between human beings that unfold over time; on the other, a subjective mimesis of personal and instantaneous experiences, fashioned in the conviction that the meaning of life resides in a few fragments, in a few lightning epiphanies, and that the poet is a “custodian not of years but moments.”⁵ Anyone who writes poetry takes it for granted that a universal truth can be told by starting from oneself and somehow withdrawing into oneself. This means subscribing to the belief that the narrative, intersubjective dimension of life (being in time, being with others, being in a plot) is not primary. In this sense, modern poetry is also a giant historical symptom: if there is a genre that attains universality through unrestricted individuation, it is because individuation, a sense of not belonging, and solitude are all part of the modern condition.

Modern Poetic Anthropology

By looking at the literary space of poetry from the perspective of the long duration, one can try to sketch out an overall trajectory of the anthropology of modern poetry. When observed from the height of our day, Romantic first persons strike us with the confidence, measure, and wholeness that they preserve when they make themselves heard. The inner life of the speakers does not dissolve into a bundle of fragmentary perceptions, hidden drives, and obscure mental associations; they speak as if they had an audience before them that was ready to listen, as if they were supported by an invisible chorus. Although the form of modern poetry owes its deep structure to the Romantic paradigm, few of the authors remain faithful to the archetype. A portion of post-Romantic poetry tries to transcend the first person, as if the life of a human being alone were no longer enough to account for reality. Another, more extensive portion maintains the self-centeredness but lowers the pretensions of the lyric voice, staging an ironic, antiheroic, marginal, or theatrical self. Still another, the most extensive of all, keeps the first person at the center of the world but presents a self that is divided and opaque to its own perception, imprisoned in an uncertain or conflicting relationship with the invisible chorus of the poem.

Corresponding to this anthropological mutation is an analogous stylistic metamorphosis. Although the premises of the revolution that changed the form of writing in verse between the second half of the nineteenth century and the period of the historical avant-gardes are contained in the poetics of Romanticism, Romantic poetry is relatively conservative and—to use an oxymoron—classicist. While it is true that the theory of lyric poetry as immediate writing, as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”⁶ or the “free and frank expression of any living and deeply held human feeling,”⁷ was widespread between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it is also true that the formal innovations of the greater Romantic lyric were relatively few when compared to what occurred after Whitman or Rimbaud. Compared to the revolution in meter, syntax, and rhetoric that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, the free verse poems in German lyric poetry of the second half of the eighteenth century and the crisis in poetic diction in the lyric poetry of English Romanticism are preludes rather than definitive ruptures. The confidence and wholeness of the speaker are reflected in an analogous form, suspended in a reformist balance between self-expression and convention, narcissism and decorum, solitude and form, which are increasingly rare in recent lyric. The poetry of the last century and a half, on the other hand, is marked by a conflict that is difficult to reconcile with the invisible chorus and tradition, in part because the spectrum of objective possibilities available to contemporary poets when they write no longer sets limits to the anarchic expression of individual talent.

After the stylistic revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the historical avant-gardes, and, definitively, after the new avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s, writing in verse accentuated the vocation for egocentrism inherent in modern lyric poetry. It definitively exposed itself to idiosyncrasy, to what Hegel called the “delirium of particularity”: poetic personae who flaunt their marginality; theatrical personae who turn the poetic monologue into a play; narcissistic personae who, with apparent naiveté, tell their story in a simple style, with the air of those who do not question their social mandate; expressionistic personae who put no limits on self-confession; regressive personae who exaggerate the private, involuntary, and irresponsible nature of poetic diction. These lyric subjects have corresponding styles: irony, mannerism, experimentalism, and forms of naive lyricism.

The Dialectic of Expressivism

But idiosyncrasy does not exhaust the meaning of modern poetry. When this process is observed from the outside, the image of the world communicated by our genre shows another aspect. As we saw at the end of the previous chapter, the subjectivism that runs through our literary space is actually a group subjectivism: such an egocentric art can only be charged with collective meaning if an invisible chorus resonates behind the voice of the poem. This support, important for any text that aspires to have value, is absolutely decisive for arts that have distanced themselves from common sense and, for this very reason, risk appearing gratuitous or incomprehensible to a lay observer. From a logical and chronological point of view, the chorus does not limit itself to intervening after the writing by bestowing praise or criticism, but influences the artist’s choices even before beginning to write, making it clear that only certain possibilities can reasonably be practiced and showing that the choices fluctuate in a space occupied by many heterogeneous choruses, by many literary tribes.

The logic of modern arts has much to teach those who reflect on the dominant ethos in Western societies over the last two centuries, for in a culture that places the meaning of life in the obligation to live up to one’s originality, the behavior of the artist ultimately casts light on the dynamics of the self.⁸ In this sense, lyric poetry, which involves some of the essential aspects of individualism, is one of the arts that best illustrates the forcefields that pulse around and within the modern identity. What does it mean for lyric poets, and for the artists of our time in general, to write at the height of their originality? What does it mean to “be yourself” and “express yourself”?

It certainly does not mean achieving full independence, autonomy from the past, from precursors, or from the expectations of others. Nothing so clearly exhibits the paradox of individualism itself as the logic inside the aesthetic sphere: the more each individual is granted the right to leave a trace of his or her own subjective difference, the more this difference turns out to be a social product. The conquest of a new autonomy is not followed by an anarchic explosion of individual talent but by the emergence of new forms of mutual influence, of tribal belonging, of tradition—a tradition that is mobile, local, polytheistic, and plural but no less binding than the network of norms, models, and topoi that accompanied the history of Western literature until the Romantic era. Compared to the relationship that premodern culture had with the customs of the past, the margins of freedom granted to individuals changed (brilliant, charismatic artists could, in principle, completely revolutionize their discipline), and the structure of the tradition changed (a relatively unitary system of rules was replaced by a plurality of schools, trends, and currents that divided up the artistic space and coexisted in conflict or indifference). However, the essential result did not change: for modern artists, too, self-expression means introducing a variation in the forest of languages that precede them, while the space of possibilities continues to transcend the singularity of the writer and exert an influence that is different, but no less important, than the influence of the premodern artistic nomoi.

This is a paradox that calls for reflection. The watchwords inspired by Romanticism have a literal meaning only when they are interpreted as signs of an abstract theoretical freedom; but, in actual fact, even in the epoch in which expressivism has become conventional wisdom, all artists find themselves caught up in a social network that precedes and determines them—a system made up of currents and tendencies that gives shape to their words and within which they must align themselves. If anything, these choral aggregations grow in strength and number when the arts become more egocentric, freer from the schemas of the past and therefore potentially more remote from common sense, and when the need to control the risk of gratuitous expression becomes urgent and dramatic. What Adorno and Bakhtin write about lyricism is true of all dehumanized art: the principle of individuation that guides creators does not guarantee the production of normative works that avoid ending up “within the contingency of mere separate existence”⁹—because “an individual and totally solitary violation of absolute silence has a frightening and sinful character.”¹⁰ When nothing remains to curb the theoretical anarchy of individual talent, there is the risk that every text will give voice to the tautology of a speaker that expresses itself without proving to be representative. It is difficult for a real text to fulfil the pretense claimed by modern poetry, to transform the particular into the universal and personal idiosyncrasy into collective singularity. In this sense, as Ben Lerner notes, “hating on actual poems … is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry.”¹¹ Inevitably, in modern times successful poems seem to be—and are—rare, because when one starts from unrestrained individuation it is always difficult to create a text that means something to many people, and because modern society multiplies differences, distancing individuals and groups and making mutual understanding more complicated.

This intrinsic fragility also contributes to the crisis in the relationship with common sense becoming accompanied by the spread of “isms”—of schools and currents. These aggregations come to occupy the space once occupied by centuries-old rules, both written and unwritten, that ensured the value of the texts and the production of collective meanings. Although the field of poetry and modern art is stirred by a process of permanent revolution, it is not the chaos of isolated cells that a fully expressivist culture would be expected to generate. It is composed not of monads but of families, tendencies, and groups that struggle among one another to conquer prestige and memory. Romantic expressivism gives partial insight into the changes that have occurred in the modern artistic space, because it gives a platform for the authors’ point of view without heeding the logic of the whole. The ideal of creative freedom, of individual talent, which was born to enthusiastically celebrate the end of the aesthetic Ancien Régime, had—and continues to have—a theoretical and negative value. Expressing oneself does not mean achieving full autonomy but being granted a right that the premodern poet had no knowledge of: the right not to belong. For two centuries, artists have been themselves because in theory they can behave like monads released from any binding constraint, ready to pass from one approach to another, willing to experiment with endless variations on inherited forms. However, when we abandon the particular point of view of individuals and look at the general panorama of the modern artistic space, we realize that the Romantic watchwords do not describe the whole reality. The conquest of complete inner freedom is not matched by complete outer freedom; the monads that can subjectively claim their own originality are objectively bound together to form families that struggle with one another, systems of forces and counterforces. To be an artist means to stake out a position in a territory of possibilities: to accept a fashion, to imitate one’s models, to preserve and surpass their approach, to vie with one’s peers, with their genealogies and traditions. The more a system of art is dehumanized, self-referential, remote from the lifeworld, and lacking in a nonspecialist audience, the more it needs to reinforce its illusio and its logic as a system. Since a unitary nomos no longer exists, every value ends up becoming relative. The only certainty of prestige is that accumulated by schools, currents, and trends, by poetic fathers or poetic mothers to draw on or fight with.

A widespread critical topos has it that imitation was an important phenomenon only as long as the age-old culture of classicism retained hegemony over European literature; when artists assimilated the new imperative of originality, the relationship with precursors supposedly lost its importance. In reality, the problem of imitation gained philosophical import precisely during the period when universal canons died, the space of recognized values became frayed and, in theory, anything became acceptable. It is no accident that the idea of the anxiety of influence, a principle that applies to all modern art, began with poetry.¹² For artists trying to be themselves in a regime of permanent revolution, precursors, peers, artistic parents, and artistic siblings are figures charged with ambivalence. They are carriers of anxiety or confidence as the case may be, or even at the same time—because they can crush a writer’s ego by occupying the territory of possibilities but also help it achieve an identity for itself. After the fall of the shared world consisting of relatively solid, centuries-old conventions, a cultural universe opened up composed of separate worlds that coexist or conflict with one another, in which there is no divine nomos, just many equivalent, earthly nomoi devoid of any legitimacy other than that based on the fragile consensus of one human group lost amid other hostile, friendly, or indifferent groups. In this age of polytheism and perspectivism, many models of beauty and truth share portions of a symbolic capital whose only foundation is a shifting social agreement, a collective illusion. In such a world, imitating individuals, works, and trends that have been given an assured value is crucial for developing an intellectual personality. The anxiety of influence represents the dialectical reverse of the charismatic and reassuring fascination that certain figures exert on artists in search of identity, creating a sense of belonging and value in an age in which belonging and values are no longer assured. Sometimes this feeling of aesthetic kinship reinvigorates an objective social and psychological kinship; sometimes it expresses what Freud called the ego ideal—what one would like to be or become. In both cases, it ends up counterbalancing the narcissistic wound that prestigious precursors inflict on egos in search of prestige. Proust is right in saying that we have as many worlds available to us as there are original artists, but he is wrong to depict them as “more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space.”¹³ However dissimilar they may appear, artistic worlds always stand in relation to families and systems; expressing oneself means entering into the ether of the languages that precede us, finding one’s own genealogy, and introducing a variation into an already-formed path. For this reason, not only is there no immediate access to the “personal way of seeing things,”¹⁴ but there is also no authentically personal way of seeing things.

Over the last two centuries, tradition has lost its unifying structures, and the conflict between incommensurable currents has torn the Western aesthetic space apart. This rupture has generated two diametrically opposed effects: it has allowed artists to depict the lifeworld with a new expressive freedom, and it has allowed them to create systems of signs far removed from the shared reality. Trends that retain a solid connection to common sense and speak to a nonspecialist audience coexist with trends that detach themselves from common sense and speak to a niche audience with a shared illusio—along the lines of an antithesis that runs throughout the system of the arts as a whole. Usually the novel, cinema, and photography are much closer to the lifeworld than contemporary figurative arts. Writing in verse occupies an intermediate position, since modern poetry, while remaining as inherently mimetic as any other form of writing, is also the most egocentric of literary genres. It is the genre that lends itself more than any other to estrangement, obscurity, and forêts de symboles. Dehumanized artistic fields obey an entirely internal dialectic, similar to the dialectic governing how fashions develop. Moreover, since the most self-referential forms of the arts do not evoke experiences that everyone can understand, they age quickly. Sometimes a peculiar form of melancholy emanates from museums of contemporary art or anthologies of twentieth-century poetry: it is dismaying to think that thousands of artists have tried to “express themselves” by immersing themselves in a fashion that today seems outmoded. It takes little for their works to be reduced to inert objects, faded trouvailles. If the remote atmosphere surrounding premodern art takes on a heroic tone, the melancholy of dehumanized modern art is imbued with precariousness: the former speaks to us of the cultural earthquake that came with the birth of the modern world; the latter shows us how fragile the discursive ether is that contains us, and how dizzying the dialectic of expressivism. The larger the distance grows between individual talent and common sense, between the world of invention and the lifeworld, the more it becomes evident that individual talents are inserted in a game of systems: free to construct an autonomous identity for themselves, monads who have in theory achieved the right not to belong continue to behave gregariously, because belonging to a group, to a chorus, is the only way to ensure meaning. But even the systems turn out to be fragile and transitory, prey to an autonomous evolution that has lost contact with a shared public foundation and which wavers in a space where everything changes and anything goes.

The Marginality of Poetry

Art forms are therefore constantly in need of legitimation, especially those that are remote from the lifeworld and those that make the author’s self central to the text: the former have to demonstrate that their world of invention is not an absurd oddity; the latter have to legitimize the gesture of pure hubris by which a human being equal to all others grants himself or herself a representative status. Modern poetry faces both these problems.

Picking up on the concept that Lenin used to explain the legitimacy of the political avant-garde, Marxist criticism defines social mandate as the power the public grants poets so that they will produce works with a collective value. In the mid-1800s, writes Benjamin, speaking about Baudelaire, the bourgeoisie stripped lyric poets of a social mandate that fifty years earlier seemed unassailable.¹⁵ We will discuss the stages of this loss later; the fact that it happened is indisputable. For the last century and a half, poetry has no longer had a mandate. It has become an art that appeals to a very restricted public, composed mostly of poets, aspiring poets, and poetry scholars, confined to a protected reserve that survives, thanks to the prestige it accumulated over the centuries, the conservatism of school curricula, and the residual patronage of a few publishers.

The arts acquire a collective weight by virtue of a mechanism of meaning production similar to that which, according to Max Weber, governs the social life of religions.¹⁶ It is ruled by a triangular logic based on a clear division of roles between the figures of authors, commentators, and readers or spectators. Just as in religions the revelation of the prophets is interpreted by priests and reaches the faithful, so in the arts the work of authors is mediated by cultural institutions (criticism, schools, universities, publishers, the press, museums, galleries) and reaches the public. When the charismatic authority of the creators no longer speaks to a real audience, and when the authority of the mediators loses all function, the mechanism goes into crisis. In the case of contemporary poetry, the logic according to which this vertical pyramid has been functioning in recent decades is horizontal and anarchic: since poetry readers are mostly aspiring poets, there is no longer a clear division between authors and readers, and cultural institutions matter less and less. The three clearest symptoms of this process are the disappearance of a real audience, the proliferation of amateur poets, and the invisibility of poets that critics deem important.

The data presented here come from Italy, the literary society I know best, but other Western countries present very similar situations. According to recent statistics reported in the press, 5 percent of Italians write poetry, although it must be kept in mind that these sorts of surveys are often unreliable.¹⁷ Other facts and figures are more interesting to look at. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the front page of one of Italy’s most widely read newspapers, La Repubblica, regularly featured an advertisement from an unknown publisher soliciting unpublished manuscripts by poets. The advertisement did not say that the aspiring author would then be asked to contribute money for the printing of the book, but the fact that this sort of ad appeared in such an expensive advertising space means that the business was profitable, suggesting an abundance of amateur poets willing to pay. Starting in the 2000s, cultural websites and social networks would drastically change the way poetry circulated, making it easy to bring work into the public eye and eliminating the mediation of publishers. Nevertheless, the number of texts appearing in inconspicuous venues, online or in print, would not be matched by any real audience. Those who frequent Italian poetry circles (people who write, continue to buy poetry books, participate in readings, follow poetry websites) know perfectly well that there is a restricted number of readers and that the reason they themselves are interested in poetry is because they write it too.¹⁸ The number of books sold is also minimal.¹⁹ In recent decades the large Italian publishing houses, those that are responsive to market forces, have constantly cut down the number of new titles. Most of the works written by authors under the age of sixty who have received critical attention have been published by small or very small publishers: having your work appear in major poetry series, those that are distributed in bookstores, “no longer means anything in itself.”²⁰

This marginal status in the publishing world is a sign of its wider marginality in society, which, although difficult to measure with reliable statistics, is easy to perceive. I would like to tell an anecdote in this regard that serves as a small survey. For some years now, I have been teaching a course on twentieth-century Italian poetry for first-year students in the department of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Siena. To demonstrate how socially marginal the literary genre has become, I ask the class to tell me the name of five living poets. I have about sixty students in the classroom: no more than four or five usually raise their hands. I then ask if they know the names of five living novelists and five living filmmakers, and I already know that everyone, or almost everyone, will say yes. I repeat the same ad hoc survey in a preparatory course for secondary school teachers, and although I am addressing a group of university graduates in the humanities who are about to become high school teachers, few of them know the names of five living Italian poets. Over the years the number of positive responses has increased slightly, but only because names of the five living poets include some Instapoets—poets who publish mainly on Instagram. Today, people who are interested in traditional cultural works but who do not exercise an intellectual profession, people who do have an intellectual profession but are not directly involved with literature, people who teach literature but are not avid readers of contemporary literature—those whom we call educated people—feel no need or duty to buy books of poetry or to know at least the names of contemporary authors; and yet they still feel the need or duty to watch movies, buy novels, and know something about living directors and novelists.

The marginalization of poetry is a constant in contemporary Western literatures, and the same phenomenon can easily be found in many countries. In 1991 Bob Perelman was inspired by the title of a panel at the American Comparative Literature conference in San Diego to write a long essay poem in couplets of six-word lines entitled “The Marginalization of Poetry”:

If poems are eternal occasions, then

the pre-eternal context for the following

was a panel on “The Marginalization

of Poetry” at the American Comparative.

Literature Conference in San Diego, on

February 8, 1991, at 2:30 P.M.:

“The Marginalization of Poetry”—it almost

goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote,

“No one listens to poetry,” but

the question then becomes, who is

Jack Spicer?²¹

Jack Spicer, whom Perelman refers to by alluding wryly to the fact that the general public is unaware of his existence (“who is | Jack Spicer?”), had in his turn put the loss of social mandate into verse:

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.²²

In 2008, when Barack Obama decided to restore the tradition of having a poem read during the presidential inauguration ceremony, an article by George Packer appeared on the website of the New Yorker asking the president not to do it. In two pages, Packer summarizes what a substantial portion of contemporary culture thinks about poetry:

Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings.… On all these occasions [the Inaugurations], the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does.²³

An art with no social mandate, a private activity written by few people for few people that means far less in collective life than it still claims to. Packer asks Obama to take note of this and to give up on an old ritual that, in his opinion, is now meaningless. It is true that in certain circumstances modern poems regain public significance (this happened with Auden’s “September 1, 1939” right after September 11, 2001), but these are exceptional situations, after which the debate on how poetry can recover its lost central role inevitably begins again. True, a new form of poetry has been emerging with much greater visibility in recent years, such as the work of Kae Tempest, or that of Amanda Gorman, who caught the eye of a broader public during Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. This is a very different kind of poetry from that of the past though. It incorporates a performance element and revives popularity thanks to a hybridization with social networks and with arts that have a mass following, such as hip-hop and rap, while the forms of writing that descend from the culturally hegemonic tradition of modern poetry remain confined to a niche.

Traditional poetry’s loss of social mandate is the effect of a profound change in the cultural demography. It must be said, however, that in fact two losses actually occurred, and the most important one did not take place when it was announced, at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Palazzeschi wrote “men don’t ask anything anymore | from poets” and Gozzano wrote “I am ashamed, yes, | I am ashamed to be a poet,” in Italy universal suffrage did not yet exist (male suffrage would be introduced in the 1913 elections and female suffrage only in 1946), the illiteracy rate recorded by the 1911 census was 46 percent, and an authoritative statistic calculated that about one third of the literate population was actually semi-illiterate.²⁴ The society of the early twentieth century was still a society of notables based on cultural deference and political proxy.²⁵ In such a context, whoever is able to write and publish a book maintains solid social prestige: a loss of mandate with the reading public does not affect the writer’s authority as an educated person among those who do not know how to read. This state of affairs continued into the early decades after World War II: in 1961, only about 25 percent of men and 15 percent of women continued into higher education after junior high school.²⁶ Change only came with mass schooling that began in the 1960s: in 1975 the percentages of men and women entering higher education were close to 55 percent and 45 percent; in the first decade of the twenty-first century the percentage for both sexes was over 90 percent.²⁷

Poetry has twice lost its mandate. The first loss occurred wholly within the literary field of a society of notables. In Italy, it took place at the beginning of the twentieth century in a world where everything that happened in the cultural domain still possessed prestige regardless: it was therefore a relative crisis. The second was much more radical. In Italy, its effects began to show at the end of the 1960s (we can use 1968 as an allegorical dividing line) and became rampant from the 1970s on. It took place in a more horizontal and leveled society, in which reading and writing were less valuable activities because they were much more common, and it was predicated on some of the large-scale democratic transformations of the second half of the twentieth century, starting with mass schooling. A further step has been taken with the change in the public sphere and culture made possible in recent decades by the Internet, allowing anyone to make their voice heard through sites and social networks.

The cumulative effect of this process has been the disintegration of poetry as a literary space. “We may think of a field as a space within which an effect of field is exercised,” writes Bourdieu.²⁸ A social interaction forms a field when its constituent parts conceive of themselves as a system, when the actors in the system find themselves connected by objective ties and subjective ties of imitation, collaboration, and competition that prompt them to think of themselves and their works in relation to the actions and works of the other participants. A common idea of Italian criticism in the last four decades is that a unified history of poetry is impossible to write because the field has exploded: there are too many writers, too different from each other, and there is no external audience; there are no shared traditions (something obvious in the second half of the twentieth century), but neither is there any debate or conflict between different poetic currents, as there was until the 1970s. Poetry is the horizontal art par excellence, the form of writing that, according to commonly accepted aesthetic paradigms, deals with subjectivity, immediacy, and self-expression. Those who know it from the inside are aware that things are more intricate than how they are viewed by this communis opinio, but this does not fit with conventional wisdom, which is unconsciously post-Romantic.

It must be said that this widespread aesthetic doxa captures the general outlines of what the genre has become in reality. In poetry, the liberation of individual talent is accompanied by the awareness that, contrary to what happens in the figurative arts, strong institutional mediations no longer exist, that it has become very easy to make one’s work public, that hierarchies seem relative because the field has exploded, and that the expressive medium—writing—no longer offers any technical resistance to the desire for self-expression. In this sense, one of the paradoxical and unintended results of the avant-garde attack on tradition is a passport to widespread creativity.²⁹ Today we tend to think that in order to practice poetry there is no need to know how to do anything, or anything qualified at least: to create a verse according to particular rules, or to possess a specific vocabulary, or a specific system of rhetorical figures. Nor is it necessary to have a story and know how to tell it, as one must be able to do in order to practice the art of fiction: in principle, anything goes in poetry. For the same reason, poetry struggles to communicate: in a regime of horizontal, self-expressive subjectivity, everyone wants to express their difference, but few people are able or wish to understand what other people’s difference consists of, or to grant it authority. If the need for self-expression unites, the content of self-expressions divides: in an art founded on the liberation of subjectivity, worlds of invention can diverge until they defy understanding.

Poetry and Song

But if contemporary poetry is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy, its deep core, what Benjamin would call its “Muse-derived element,” proliferates and spreads.³⁰ It does so, however, in an art other than poetry, which arose out of mass culture: the pop and rock song, and then rap and hip-hop. In Italy, one of the first people to describe this change was the writer who first gave voice and form to the youth culture that emerged from the movements of the 1970s, Pier Vittorio Tondelli:

Entire generations have satisfied the need for poetry, an absolute and poignant need in the years of early youth, by memorizing song lyrics: pop ballads, psychedelic, neo-futuristic, intimate, sentimental, dreamy, political, ironic, demented texts.… While learned poetry was stuck in the territory of interpretation, exegesis, and tedious unpacking at school desks; while the poetry of the neo-avant-garde was studied, in identical ways, in college classrooms; while the poets of the seventies tried to imitate singer-songwriters, climbing onto improvised stages in city squares and pinewood forests, attempting, like Allen Ginsberg, to accompany their verses with the music of a harmonica, an accordion, or a pianola, young people resurrected the classical figure of the poet, someone who unites words to music.…

Poetry and songs, then. An aspect too often given insufficient consideration by official and professional literary critics: the realization, in short, that the greatest poets of recent decades have been produced by the world of rock.³¹

This process of substitution, which Tondelli announces provocatively, using hyperbole (“the greatest poets of recent decades have been produced by the world of rock”), should be interpreted within a larger historical phenomenon, one that is part of the most important cultural metamorphoses the West has undergone in recent centuries: the birth and legitimization of a culture for the masses, called popular or pop. In the second half of the twentieth century, completing a process that spans the modern era, newspapers, television, commercial movies, songs, fashion, advertising, and the Internet built a culture quite unlike the one taught at school.³² Originally aimed at consumption and the market, over time pop culture has gained authority, giving a voice to social groups that were excluded from traditional canons and claimed the right to memory. It is actually a new humanistic culture, a corpus of texts and discourses that aspire to explain or tell about life in entertaining or instructive forms, just as traditional culture seeks to do. From this perspective, the generations of writers and readers born since the 1940s have experienced a kind of cultural bilingualism: they have been trained in the humanistic canons of old and, at the same time, in pop culture. Indeed, in the lives of many, the latter often precedes the former, seeing as young people who do not come from educated families almost always absorb the former years before they do the latter. As long as society preserved hierarchies based on the authority of the intermediate bodies, that is, power structures based on notables, traditional culture carried direct political weight; but the more a society transitions from the hegemony of elites to a true society of the masses, the less political weight is carried by the forms of the past. Pop culture is true mass culture: it spread thanks to some of the great democratic processes that ran through the twentieth century (the expansion of public schooling, the diffusion of free time—the mass version of literary otium—and the possibility for everyone’s voice to be heard). Its relationship with the traditional humanistic legacy is complex, metamorphic, changeable, consisting of clashes and mixtures, conflict and hybridization. What happened in the late twentieth century resembles, on a grander scale, the process that between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries revolutionized the system of literary genres, giving rise to a new middle-class audience and a new kind of intellectual. Forms that were once prestigious and canonical, such as epic poetry, tragedy in verse, and comedy in verse, founded on continuity with the ancient world and intended for an audience of literati, yielded to new forms that in the eyes of classicist intellectuals might have seemed crude, intended for immediate consumption of the general public and lacking any future because they had no relationship with the past: journalism, the novel, and the drame bourgeois. Compared to this phenomenon, what happened in the second half of the twentieth century is broader still.

The dialectic between poetry and song should therefore be seen within an overall cultural transformation. The relationship between the two arts is dual and ambivalent, consisting of competition and contiguity. The most visible aspect is competition: while modern poetry now seems to be a genre far removed from the culture of the masses, writes Tondelli, a “territory of interpretation, exegesis, and tedious unpacking at school desks,” the “youthful need for poetry” is satisfied by rock music:

at this point, only in the world of rock does the image of the Romantic poet survive, burning bright—that of the writer who lives tragically to the end, until death and dissolution, in the conflict between art and life, between the call of the imagination and the demands of everyday existence. The official poets hide behind their desks and their books. They mix and refine words and rhymes. They applaud each other and congratulate each other, praising each other for the twenty copies they’ve sold. You get the feeling that beyond a combinatorial ability, beyond formal perfection, there is no soul. In rock poets, however cursed they may be, this soul is eccentrically alive and pulsating.³³

Rock and pop and today’s hip-hop and rap have a social mandate that modern poetry has lost. The choruses that echo behind the voice of the singer and the poet are of different magnitudes, the former made up of masses, the latter comprising a few readers. When Tondelli claims that the new poets are rock singers, he is giving voice to a historical pattern shared by a portion of the youth public that has long ignored contemporary poets but perhaps buys pocketbook editions of the consecrated poets of the past and associates them with listening to indie rock. This new social chorus no longer recognizes the boundary between high and low culture that the traditional humanistic canon erected so peremptorily until half a century ago.³⁴ The change in power relations is accompanied by the transformation that the song genre underwent in the late 1960s, when pop music became the medium of the new youth culture that emerged after World War II. The generation that was decisive for this change was born during the 1940s and was between twenty and thirty years old around 1968. School curricula and university teaching of the future might very well reserve a larger space for the singers of that period than what they give to contemporary poets. On the other hand, if we look at the effects their works have had on the social history of culture, it is undeniable that the Nobel Prize winner for literature Seamus Heaney, born in 1939, has had and will have less influence than the Nobel Prize winner for literature Bob Dylan, born in 1941.

As a matter of fact, it was the Nobel Prize awarded to Dylan in 2016 that rekindled the debate about poetry and song. Participants often comment on the nature of the art that Dylan practices. There have been questions about whether songs are literature or poetry per se, or whether poetry has entered a musical phase again, as it has at other times throughout history.³⁵ For me, the really important question is a different one, and it is not about the nature of the arts, which is structurally changeable and open to transformation, but about their social history. The prize given to Dylan is new for two reasons. To begin with, it is the first time the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to an author who comes from a culture other than what, for as long as the Nobel has existed, has been the traditional humanistic culture. The Nobel committee has also shown in the past that it can have a broad idea of the concept of literature: it has given prizes to historians (Theodor Mommsen) and philosophers (Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell); it has recognized the oratorical qualities of politicians (Winston Churchill) and hybrid works between journalism and literature (Svetlana Alexievich). However, it had never awarded an author who came out of popular culture, partly because until the 1960s pop culture did not exist in the form it does now; nor did it hold the weight it has for us today. While the Nobel Prize usually goes to authors known to minimal niches of connoisseurs (Herta Müller or Tomas Tranströmer, to name a few winners in recent years) or to medium-sized niches (Mo Yan, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Handke), everyone or almost everyone knew Dylan’s name, if not his work.³⁶ The only other winner known to the wider public was Churchill but for entirely different reasons. Second, the breach through which pop culture entered the fortress of a prize reserved for traditional literature was poetry, because it was clear to everyone that Dylan’s work occupied the symbolic space once occupied by modern poetry. But while the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature represents the sanction of a process that began decades earlier, one should not take the de facto judgment for a value judgment. The fact that songs have taken the place of poems for the educated lay public is a real and inevitable process that corresponds to the cultural logic of modern societies. The mistake made by many is to turn this into an aesthetic judgment: modern poetry’s social minority status does not mean that today’s poems are worse than those a century or two ago, or that contemporary poetry no longer has anything to say. We will return to this point in the following sections.

Although competitive from the perspective of a sociology of the arts, the relationship between poetry and song is also a relation of contiguity. If we consider the history of forms, the two arts stand in a dual relationship: archaeological and figural. Archaeological, because the new genre rediscovers forms abandoned centuries earlier by the old one, for example, restoring the ties with music; figural, because the more recent art accentuates certain archetypal elements of the older art, thereby rediscovering some aspects of poetry that modern poetry tended to conceal. Songs have unearthed deep structures from the lyric form that the history of silent poetry had covered up. For example, the “choral invasion” that Bakhtin sees as the foundation of the lyric has been made fully visible in a mass ritual of the last fifty years: the rock concert. The thousands of people singing a lyrical text in unison and identifying themselves with the experience that the singer intones on stage illustrate Bakhtin’s words with a force that literature had not experienced for some time. Another one of these figural embodiments can be seen in a recurring music video topos: the singer is in a public space surrounded by people with whom he or she would normally connect if it were a realistic scene; at this point the music starts, and the video star isolates himself or herself from everyone by starting to sing or staring straight ahead. None of the surrounding people notice anything and everything goes on as before, accompanied by the music and lyrics. Few examples so graphically illustrate the musical element of modern lyric poetry: the escape from objective reality and human relationships, the idea that the world acquires a sense only when it is veiled by a subjective patina, and that “the ‘I’ whose voice is heard in the lyric is an ‘I’ that defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to objectivity.”³⁷ All this can become a mass choral experience, but it does not change the intrinsically subjective nature of what is shared: the mass of people who gather at a rock concert do not put aside subjectivity to enter into a suprapersonal meeting ground, but they do come together precisely because they collectively share a form of subjectivity.

Contiguity and competition, then. The most interesting social phenomenon arises from the intersection of these two relationships: at a time when poetry is losing its mandate, its Muse-derived element is spreading among the masses, thanks to popular music. Today, millions of people enjoy works that almost always have a lyrical spirit, that start from the speaker and, because of their internal logic, overlay the implicitly subjective nature of the form onto the objective representation of the content, the music, or rhythmic delivery of the words onto the mimesis. We like songs even when their lyrics are banal or incomprehensible, thanks to the secondary meanings that the power of sound superimposes on words. An eternal law of sung poetry ensures that the most obvious or stupid themes acquire a new truth when they are transfigured by music. It is no coincidence that the simple, direct, and immediate passions that the learned arts censored in recent centuries have found representation in melodrama and pop music. In this sense, musical poetry is a pure example of estrangement, of transfiguration through form.

Monads and Systems

What is the truth content of modern poetry as a symbolic form? What image of the world and the modern condition does it convey to us?

The first spiritual content that is crystallized in its sensible signs is “the unexplained need for individuality … which is inherent in our age.”³⁸ Mallarmé’s formula referred to the formal innovations that mark the history of the genre: since binding stylistic conventions no longer exist, poets know they can behave, in principle, as monads, abandoning tradition, experimenting, and innovating to the point of obscurity. The content is marked by an equally pronounced individualism. Contrary to what occurred in the cultural system of the Gesellschaftslyrik and in the cultural system to which the autobiographical poetry of Horace or Petrarch refers, the first person that resonates in modern poetry is not only a collective subject or the subjective embodiment of exemplary qualities; it can also be an individuated self that has personal and unrepeatable experiences. In addition to being individual, these experiences are also egocentric. They are literally so: they happen in interiore homine and in isolated moments, far from others and from the plots that individuals weave when they intertwine their lives, when they spend time together. The most individualistic aspect of modern poetry is its hidden conflict with the aspects of life that transcend the sphere of the first person, since the form of modern poetry, as we have seen, seems to ignore the two things—the presence of others and the passage of time—that demonstrate the world’s transcendence in relation to the self. Although modern poems obviously talk about this as well, because this is the stuff of life, the textual form tips so heavily toward the first person and passing instants that they reduce the other levels of reality to the mere content of an egocentric and instantaneous discourse. As the symbolic form of an era that has granted individuals unprecedented weight, modern poetry communicates, above all, the idea that society is a collection of separate monads immersed in a discontinuous flow of experience.

The importance that lyricism has had for the literature of the last few centuries is often underestimated. Studies on the system of modern genres sometimes include an idea that goes back to the writings of Friedrich Schlegel and that in recent decades has become a commonplace, thanks to the global readership of Bakhtin. According to this commonplace, the hegemony of the novel over modern literature prompted all other genres to become novelistic, that is, to incorporate polyphonic or diegetic elements that are partially foreign to their natural logic.³⁹ This is partly true: even without knowing Bakhtin, Brecht and Szondi showed why modern drama tends to imitate narrative techniques;⁴⁰ and as we know, there are many poems from recent centuries that try to escape from the limits of the short, subjective monolingual form. But the contamination of genre described by Bakhtin is not the only kind that recurs with a certain frequency in modern literature. The large number of poems written in a narrative style could in fact be contrasted with an equally large number of novels written in a lyrical style.⁴¹ This is what happens every time the narrative voice (or the last word) is given to a hero who is always in the forefront, or every time the interest of the narrative does not arise from the story but from the way of telling it, and the way of telling it is a trace of the author’s gaze. If a work accentuates diction and hides mimesis, if it attracts the reader because of the way it is written and not because of the story it tells, it appropriates a lyrical element even when the writer hides behind absolute impersonality.⁴² It is also one of the most widely used expedients to overcome the problem that plagues novelists: how to create interest out of the everyday life of ordinary people, who are immersed in that “middle station of life” from which Robinson Crusoe had to escape to become the protagonist of a novel.⁴³ Flaubert’s solution would establish the model: if the prose of ordinary life is completely devoid of aura, if the story to be told is pure nothingness, one can give meaning to a plot that in itself would be uninteresting by accentuating the weight of the form, by shifting part of the interest from the objectivity of the story to the subjectivity of the style, and thus inventing a kind of lyricism without a speaker that is no less egocentric than the personal lyricism we find in monological novels focused on a single hero. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the subjective elements began to invade theater as well, as evidenced by the success of dramas built not on the staging of interhuman relationships taking place in the present but on the introspective analysis of the main characters.⁴⁴ The lyricization of genres is almost as important as the “novelization” on which Bakhtin insists: a clear sign that subjectivism is every bit as essential to the present literary system as novelistic polyphony.

When we observe this apparent victory of the self and individual talent over tradition and common sense from the outside, though, the triumph of subjectivism shows its reverse side. The more the literary space of poetry loses any relationship with the lifeworld, with a shared tradition and a nonspecialist audience, the more poets find themselves dependent on the small social chorus and the small tradition from which they draw. An art born to tell the story of monadic individuals who do not belong to the collective life ends up showing that monads build their identity on imitation, that is, on belonging. This leads to an apparently paradoxical but perfectly logical result: the crisis in nomoi and the triumph of individual talent do not imply the birth of an anarchic literary domain in which monads apply to the letter the theoretical imperative to express themselves freely. Instead, it entails two consequences that are apparently antithetical to the poetics of expressivism: the spread of group behavior and the development of separate cultural systems remote from the lifeworld that therefore produce extreme forms of obscurity in the eyes of those who do not share the assumptions of those systems. In this case, modern poetry functions as an ideal type of collective social behaviors governed by dynamics very close to those that govern the social behavior of poets. Today, between the active and the passive side of contemporary narcissism, between the imperative of “express yourself” and “be yourself,” there lies an aesthetic dimension dominated by the pursuit of a personal lifestyle. It is easy to understand, then, how the logic that inspires such a pursuit resembles the dialectic of artistic systems ruled by self-expression, as is modern poetry.

But if expressivism is indeed the extreme phase of modern individualism, then contemporary artistic fields lend themselves to being understood as figures of a much bigger state of affairs. This swarming of monads who have won the right not to belong and who tend toward an individual purpose, who lack a shared world and a stable tradition but are embedded in small social groups and small systems on which their identity and satisfaction depend, also represents an extraordinary allegory of life in the present age. It would be difficult to find a device that exemplifies the cultural logic of our time so aptly and powerfully: relativism; the lack of a collective framework of values; the fragmentation of interests, cultures, and groups; the dialectic between the achievement of subjective autonomy and the discovery that this autonomy is nevertheless embedded in a network of small or large dependencies; the dialectic between the right to individual expression and the risk that this principle produces, in the eyes of those who do not share our assumptions, idiosyncratic texts that do not communicate, that do not mean anything.

In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel reflected on the future of the era he called Romantic and indicated the two directions in which the art of the future would develop: “the imitation of external objectivity in all its contingent shapes” and “the liberation of subjectivity, in accordance with its inner contingency.”⁴⁵ And so it would be. The art of recent centuries seeks to reproduce contingent life with a mimetic precision never achieved by premodern art, delving into the meticulous representation of a differentiated society. At the same time, however, it gives unprecedented importance to the display of individual singularity, legitimizing content and forms that would have been completely inconceivable in other epochs. Although the supreme example of subjectivism in the reasoning of his aesthetics is the eighteenth-century humorous novel, the same principle can explain art forms that Hegel could not yet know, such as modern poetry or some of the modern visual arts. The dialectic that opposes objective realism to lyricism, humor, and subjective estrangement runs throughout all the arts, but there are genres whose structural characteristics lend themselves better to expressing one of the two principles. In the division of labor on which today’s literary space is based, poetry usually takes the side of subjectivity, whereas fiction occupies itself with describing the relationship between individuals and other people, and between individuals and circumstances. While the novel still attempts to construct a shared world supported by the elementary and objective devices of plot and character, modern poetry remains the most egocentric of genres. In the majority of cases, it continues to have a lyric form; it collects texts in which a speaker recounts fragments of subjective experience in a style that aims to be subjective, that is, far from the degree-zero of ordinary communication. But the egocentrism is just as pronounced in texts that do not have a lyric form, as we have seen, because it is transferred to the gaze and the style and takes the form of estrangement. This organic relationship to subjectivity as the content and form of experience makes poetry the most widely practiced art, the primary medium of amateur expressivism and generic creativity. In common perception, one can write poetry without reading poetry, without following contemporary poetry, and without possessing any technique. Other people interest us primarily as mirrors, as sounding boards of our life stories: when it is their turn to express their own subjective difference, the discourse they give is almost never of interest to us unless they resemble us, because it risks giving voice to a merely private or tribal idiosyncrasy that does not relate to a common ground. The image of the world that we draw from the literature of our time presents different points of view on the same historical landscape, marked by individualism, by the breaking down of large explicit bonds, by the strengthening of the small implicit ties that surround the self and guarantee only a local meaning for its expressions and desires. The forms of art tell the history of humanity with greater accuracy than do historical documents.

1. The term illusio comes from Bourdieu’s sociology. Bourdieu brings the term back to its etymological meaning, which he derives from Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: illusio as in ludere, the ability to “play along,” to accept as meaningful the assumptions and stakes of a social practice. See Pierre Bourdieu (with Loïc Wacquant), Réponses (1992); English translation, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 98–101; and Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art (1992, 1998); English translation, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 227–231.

2. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds: 25th Anniversary Edition, Updated and Expanded (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 28–34.

3. On the role of die Macht der Umstände, “the power of circumstances,” has in narrative, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik; English translation, Aesthetics: Lectures of Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 1070–1071.

4. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979). Lasch takes his notion of narcissism from that developed by Béla Grunberger, Le Narcissisme: Essais de psychanalyse (1971); English translation, Narcissism, trans. Joyce S. Diamanti (New York: International Universities Press, 1979); and Grunberger, Narcisse et Anubis: Études psychanalytiques, 1954–1986 (1989); English translation, New Essays on Narcissism, trans. and ed. David Macey (London: Free Association Books, 1989).

5. “Passano—tornava a dirsi—tutti assieme gli anni | e in un punto s’incendiano, che sono io | custode non di anni ma di attimi” (“The years—he was telling himself once more—pass as one | and burst into flame at a point, which is me | custodian not of years but moments”). Vittorio Sereni, “Un posto di vacanza,” IV, lines 19–21, in Stella variabile (1981, Variable Star); English translation, “A Holiday Place,” in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni, ed. and trans. Peter Robinson and Marcus Perryman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 237.

6. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 246.

7. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri (1817–1832); English translation, Zibaldone, trans. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 4234–4235.

8. “In our civilization, moulded by expressivist conceptions, it has come to take a central place in our spiritual life, in some respects replacing religion. The awe we feel before artistic originality and creativity places art on the border of the numinous and reflects the crucial place that creation / expression has in our understanding of human life.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 376). “Aesthetics is the field par excellence in which the problems brought about by the subjectivization of the world characteristic of modern times can be observed in the chemically pure state.” Luc Ferry, Homo aestheticus: L’invention du goût à l’âge démocratique (1990); English translation, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert De Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3.

9. Theodor W. Adorno, “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft” (1957); English translation, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 38.

10. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroj v èstetičeskoj dejatel’nosti”; English translation, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” trans. Vadim Liapunov, reprinted in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 170.

11. Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 76.

12. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

13. Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (1927); English translation, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 299.

14. Ibid.

15. Walter Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (1939); English translation, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 156.

16. Nathalie Heinich, Le triple jeu de l’art contemporain (Paris: Minuit, 1998), 56ff. Heinich builds on the analysis of Weber’s sociology of religion introduced by Bourdieu (Pierre Bourdieu, “Une interprétation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber,” in Archives européennes de sociologie 12, no. 1 [1971]: 2–21). See also Eduardo de La Fuente, “La filosofia weberiana del profeta e il compositore d’avanguardia,” in Rassegna italiana di sociologia 42, no. 4 (2001): 513–540.

17. Fabio Chiusi, “L’Italia, il paese con tre milioni di poeti,” L’Espresso, January 31, 2017.

18. This has been the situation since the 1970s. See Alfonso Berardinelli, “Effetti di deriva,” in Alfonso Berardinelli and Franco Cordelli, Il pubblico della poesia (Cosenza: Lerici, 1975).

19. According to official sales data provided to the Italian Publishers Association by the Nielsen agency, in 2018 poetry books made up about 1 percent of the Italian market, and they were largely classic texts.

20. Gianluigi Simonetti, La letteratura circostante: Narrativa e poesia nell’Italia contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2018), 35.

21. Bob Perelman, “The Marginalization of Poetry,” in The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3.

22. Jack Spicer, “Thing Language,” in My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 373.

23. George Packer, “Presidential Poetry,” New Yorker, December 18, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/news/george-packer/presidential-poetry.

24. “Suffragio universale e analfabetismo: Appunti statistici,” Nuova Antologia, 5th ser., vol. 93, file 946, May 16, 1911, 330–338. The calculation was made with an eye to the 1913 elections with universal male suffrage, so it does not take women into account. In the end, the final calculation was “three and a half million educated voters versus more than five million illiterate or nearly illiterate voters,” but then it adds, “And this is the most favorable hypothesis: in reality the proportion of educated to uneducated will be worse.” “Suffragio universale e analfabetismo,” 333.

25. On the “society of deference,” see Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (New York: Encounter Books, 2010), part 2, chap. 1 (“Democracy Versus the Deference World”).

26. ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics), L’Italia in 150 anni: 7. Education, http://www3.istat.it/dati/catalogo/20120118_00/cap_7.pdf, fig. 7.3.

27. Ibid.

28. See Bourdieu (with Wacquant), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 100.

29. See Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the notion of generic creativity, central to the logic of contemporary art, see Gabriele Guercio, Il demone di Picasso: Creatività generica e assoluto della creazione (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017).

30. Benjamin discusses the musische Element of an art—specifically, the musische Element of the epic—in his essay on Leskov: Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows” (1936); English translation, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nicholas Leskov” in Illuminations, 98.

31. Pier Vittorio Tondelli, “Poesia e Rock (1987–89),” in Un weekend postmoderno; reprinted in Opere (Milan: Bompiani, 2001), 335.

32. For a comprehensive interpretation of this transformation in Europe, see Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (London: HarperPress, 2006), part 5. Broadly speaking, with appropriate modifications, Sassoon’s argument also applies to the United States.

33. Tondelli, “Poesia e rock,” 336–337.

34. See Jay David Bolter, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

35. See Richard F. Thomas, “Conclusion,” in Why Bob Dylan Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2017); and Alexandre Gefen, L’Idée de littérature: De l’art pour l’art aux écritures d’intervention (Paris: Corti, 2021), 9–13.

36. See Jerzy Jerniewicz, “I’m a Poet and I Know It: The Nobel Prize and Bob Dylan’s Literary Credentials,” Aspen Review 2 (2017), https://www.aspen.review/article/2017/im-a-poet-and-i-know-it-the-nobel-prize-and-bob-dylans-literary-credentials/.

37. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 41.

38. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Sur l’Évolution littéraire” (1891); English translation, “The Evolution of Literature,” in Selected Prose Poems, Essays & Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 19.

39. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki English translation, “Epic and Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 6–7.

40. Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater: Über eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik (1957); English translation, Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956); English translation, Theory of the Modern Drama, ed. and trans. Michael Hays (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

41. See Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).

42. See Gérard Genette, Fiction et Diction (1991); English translation, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 16–21.

43. At the beginning of the novel that bears his name, Robinson Crusoe is summoned by his father, who is old and sick with gout. This merchant from Bremen who had immigrated to England had already lost two sons; he knew that the third wanted to become a sailor and thought it fitting to give him a lesson in life. According to Robinson’s father, the pursuit of adventure is suitable either for men of superior status or for the desperate; the son of a merchant, on the other hand, should be satisfied with what is offered by “the middle station of life,” that is, middle-class life. Mr. Crusoe knows from experience that this station is the best of all, the most suited for human happiness, the most distant from uncertainty. He wants his son to remain faithful to it. Robinson will disobey. He will set sail several times, face dangers and uncertainties, and be shipwrecked on a desert island; but it is for this very reason that he will have an interesting life, a narratable destiny. If the young Crusoe had remained faithful to his initial station, he would never have become the protagonist of a book: not surprisingly, the part dedicated to the events of his father is only a few pages long. Since its earliest founding texts, the modern novel has been plagued by this ambivalence: bourgeois life seems interesting only when it is shaken up by something extraordinary. Only when the genre reaches the mature phase of its history does it manage to partially overcome this contradiction. While Defoe finds stories worth telling only in exceptions to the average, the great nineteenth-century novel would try to give a narrative interest to the ordinary life of ordinary people—to the middle station of life.

44. Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, chap. 2.

45. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:608.