Poetry as Enchantment

Dana Gioia, one of America’s leading poet-critics, explains why poetry exists and why we need it in this sparkling collection of essays.

More personal than any of Gioia’s earlier works, Poetry as Enchantment reflects a lifetime of thought and experience. Gioia, the author of Can Poetry Matter?, talks about poetry in a radically different way than it is currently being taught or discussed. In the title essay, he explains that poetry is speech raised to the level of song, and though poetry may often be misunderstood as intellectual, it moves us the way music does. Poetry charms its readers, creating a heightened experience of attention. It addresses readers in the fullness of their humanity, simultaneously speaking to the mind, emotions, imagination, memory, and physical senses. Without academic jargon, Poetry as Enchantment relates literature to the questions of life.

Dana Gioia is a poet and critic. He has published six full-length collections of verse―99 Poems: New & Selected won the Poets’ Prize as the best new book of the year, and Interrogations at Noon won the American Book Award―and a memoir, Studying with Miss Bishop (Paul Dry Books, 2021). His controversial volume Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is credited with helping revive the role of poetry in American public culture. Gioia has served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and as California State Poet Laureate. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.