I love opera. It's a huge part of my emotional life. And yet for a variety of reasons, it just didn't become important to me. So if you're out there listening and you're not an opera fan or you've never been exposed to it, you can start with Loboam or Madam Butterfly. You can actually listen to it profitably without a libretto, without the words, just close your eyes and listen to a great voice.
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.