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Book Reviews Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry Robert Pinsky Princeton University Press, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2002, x + 95pp. ISBN: 0691096171. Contemporary Political Theory (2004) 3, 104–105. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300082

Originally delivered as part of the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, this book contains a series of thoughts on the role of poetry in democracy, in particular contemporary American democracy. Rather grandly, it sets out ‘to consider the voice of poetry F emphasizing its literal or actual ‘‘voice’’ F within the culture of American democracy, amid the tensions of pluralism’ (p. 2). As head of the popular Favorite Poem Project, which documented poetry readings by ordinary American citizens, and having served an unprecedented two terms as America’s Poet Laureate, one would expect Pinsky to be well placed to share with us some original ideas on this subject. However, I shall be frank: the resulting book is far from brilliant, at least by any yardstick F scientific or other F that values clarity and precision. The book’s main thesis, if I understand it correctly, is that poetry shares roots and affinities with democracy because of two quintessential features. First, because poems are the intimate expression of individual voice, they are linked to the notion of human dignity and form a countervailing power F and underground resistance, as it were F against the apparent loudness of mass culture and show business. Second, poems always invoke a larger F presumably democratic F community, and have therefore necessarily a social character. As Pinsky puts it: ‘Poetry is a vocal imagining, ultimately social but essentially individual and inward’ (p. 39). Now it is easy to concur with the author in saying that most good poems simultaneously contain something of the individual and of the public realm. Pinsky is at his best when he re-reads and interprets some beautiful poems in this light, notably Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘Eros Turannos’, William Carlos Williams’s ‘These’, and Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial’. And he stresses compellingly that it is pointless to expect poetry to compete with mass culture and modern media, precisely because poetry’s human scale makes it unsuited for the demands of that culture. But disappointingly given the book’s stated aims and title, Pinsky makes few, if any, inroads in explicating the relevance of such poetic features to democracy. Moreover, whatever arguments he does harbor to talk of democracy are thin and stretched at best. ‘Poetry,’ according to the author, ‘mediates, on a particular and immensely valuable level, between the inner consciousness of the individual and reader and the outer world of other people

Book Reviews

105

... I have said that poetry penetrates to where the body recognizes the stirring of meaning’ (pp. 45–46). Or elsewhere: ‘To some extent, poetry always includes the social realm because poetry’s very voice evokes the attentive presence of some other, or its lack’ (p. 30). Now, even disregarding the trut