Tartarus is the lowest region of the classical Greco-Roman hell. So I have no idealistic notions of where these jazz musicians have ended up. They're in the underworld and they're not even the high-reshelon. The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus. That's really lovely. There's one other allusion in the poem I should probably point out. And at this visionary moment in WB8s, he imagines these holy men that are kind of in the gold mosaic of a wall. He calls them the singing masters of our soul. Anyway, there's... I stole part of that line, but I think I made it my own thing
When he was a child, poet Dana Gioia's mother would come home from a long day of work and recite poems while she cleaned. It was a way, he realized later, for her to express the feelings she didn't want to describe directly, and to vent her sorrows without burdening her son. This, he believes, is what makes poetry so compelling: It's the secret language of emotions, a bit of magic that gets us through the day. Listen as Gioia speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about poems, mortality, and loved ones who died too young. Gioia also explains the fundamental role of allusions in poems, and how--if they’re really good--they have the power to summon the dead.