The Power of Poetry

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I think especially in earlier generations, I don't know if this is fair to her parents and parents parents, but emotion was often repressed to help lead the surface. My Mexican grandfather only went to fourth grade, asked him why he had to quit. He said, well, when my father was murdered, your, my brother and I had to become cowboys. And so I look at this thing and that's why I have never believed what I was taught at Stanford and Harvard, that poetry was an elite, intellectual form of language. You can do anything you want in poetry, but the bulk of great poems have been works that are pretty accessible to any alert, intelligent person.

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.