The poet and critic cannot afford to be patient and yet must be patient anyway. The actual writing will come at the caprice of occasion, fortune, and deadline, and yet it must unfold as if it had all been conceived whole from the beginning. Such is the lesson one may learn from Dana Gioia’s books of poetry and criticism as they have been published over the last four decades.

His critical books conform, in general, to a pattern: each of them appears as a major intervention in contemporary culture buttressed by a series of secondary but related concerns. This was the case with his first critical volume, Can Poetry Matter?, whose title essay has managed to stay controversial despite having been published long ago in 1991, and it is the case with his sixth, published now in his seventy-fourth year. The Gioia form is to feature a long, important title essay; several tangentially related, more modest essays; and a series of brief reviews and short reflections, all culled from the sundry freelance work of the writer but ordered such that a unified impression is achieved.

Can Poetry Matter?, for instance, begins with what probably remains Gioia’s most widely read work in prose. It was a gauntlet thrown down at the contemporary literary world and specifically at the almost wholly academic culture that had sprung up and subsumed American poetry since the middle of the twentieth century. Gioia made a plea for a kind of poetry that left those isolated perches and provided the traditional satisfactions of music, great and humane themes, familiar language, and rich narrative. In the essays that immediately followed (“The Dilemma of the Long Poem” and “Notes on the New Formalism”) and the one that concludes the volume (“The Poet in an Age of Prose”), Gioia fleshed out some of the details of what such a renewed, broadly democratic, and non-specialist literary culture might look like.