Now Paglia finds "too much work by the most acclaimed poets labored, affected, and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative." She is "shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past forty years." Poets today "have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era." This situation is particularly dire because "at this time of foreboding about the future of Western culture, it is crucial to identify and preserve our finest artifacts." And you thought only our "democracy" was under attack! No, they want our Norton anthologies, too. If they hit us again, how shall we fight them, now that our poetic language has become "stale and derivative"? Of what use against their bombs will our sagging synecdoches be? If only Grumman made fresh metaphors, too...

The best way to think about an alarmist book like this one is, first, to try to figure out who might want to read it. The only people who truly care about the fate of poetry are the small, rarefied group of devotees who write and/or avidly read poetry. Needless to say, they are not Paglia's audience, since the last thing that would attract their interest--or their respect--is an elementary, and exceedingly banal, primer on how to read a handful of poems from the distant to the recent past. And how such reading exercises would help genuine poets replenish their language defies comprehension.

Writers and lovers of poetry would be aware, too, that the situation Paglia is describing is a figment of her publicity-deprived imagination. For one thing, her golden age of the 1960s, far more than our own moment, shook with mandarin anxiety that poetry, and high culture in general, was being snuffed out by the counterculture. For another, if a "crisis" exists in poetry, it's the same trying circumstances that prevail in the world of art in general. We live in a prosperous society that offers plenty of free time for the coddled children of the middle and upper-middle class (and beyond), a society where there are more college-educated people than at any time in modern history. And so there are now more people than at any time in human history who are, understandably, seeking to escape the primordial curse of uncreative human labor by--usually thanks to their parents' financial support--trying to make various kinds of art.

The result is an expanded market, a huge inflation of artistic output, and a sharp intensification of competition. There are probably no fewer worthwhile poems, novels and paintings now being made by gifted people than there ever were. But there's a vast increase in desperate, ego-driven shit, of which Paglia's book happens to be a good example. Overproduction makes it harder for good work to get noticed, and thus harder to find. And because the old aesthetic criteria have been relativized--or marginalized--by new conditions that we can barely understand or articulate, it's also more difficult to recognize real art when we do see it.

If Paglia's book isn't for anyone who has a stake in the future of poetry, who is it for? It's for educated people who want to feel better about not being as interested in poetry as they've been told educated people should be. Paglia belongs to that group of critics who learned long ago how to satisfy the vanity of smart, culturally credentialed people who either no longer have the time to read or who, for one reason or another, are not drawn to high culture--in this case, poetry. You tell such people in wry, ironic, cultured tones that there's no longer anything worth reading. In this way, you reassure them that the classics they read in college, and perhaps graduate school, are all they need to know. You inform them of all this under the aspect of a "crisis." That way, you give them an occasion to substitute moral indignation for intellectual absorption; you enable them to indulge the illusion of experiencing an "issue" of high culture as though they were experiencing the real thing. America must be the only country in the world where moral indignation has become an established intellectual style.

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