John Zheng: Poetry as Enchantment by Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia. Poetry as Enchantment. Paul Dry Books, 2024. ISBN: 978-1589881952. 272 pp.

Near the end of 2024, Dana Gioia, one of America’s most prominent poet-critics, published two crucial books of criticism, one of which is Poetry as Enchantment, a collection of essays divided into three subtitled sections about poetry’s enduring enchantment, fond reflections on the friendships with writers like Donald Davie, Elizabeth Bishop, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim,  insightful analyses of poetry of Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, W. H. Auden, and Weldon Kees, and unique discussions of the west coast writers and editors. 

The title essay is the keel of the book which, in Gioia’s words, “explores the nature of poetry, a subject that seems poorly understood at present” (xvi) and is the focus of this review. Gioia believes that enchantment is crucial to the art of poetry. Thinking “a current misapprehension about the nature of poetry … has created problems in how…the art is generally taught in schools” (5), Gioia addresses the topic with his three crucial observations: Poetry is the oldest form of literature, a universal human art, and a form of vocal music.

His first observation is that poetry existed before writing was invented and “stood at the center of culture as the most powerful way of remembering, preserving, and transmitting the identity of a tribe, a culture, a nation” (5). As a way of remembering, poetry was a means that used “a mnemonic technology to preserve human experience” and to enrich human consciousness (6). As the oldest form of literature with an efficient oral function, poetry clarified life and served as, in Robert Frost’s words, “a momentary stay against confusion.” 

The next observation shows that poetry was a cultural practice developed and employed in any human society, whether isolated or not. This practice refers to mostly oral poetry. Gioia believes that “every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely poetry” to reflect “the unique cognitive capacity of the human mind and body” (7). To extend Gioia’s observation, each period has its characteristics in poetic expressions. 

Gioia’s third observation explains that poetry, as a form of vocal music, “began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic” (7). He asserts that neither classical Greek and Chinese cultures nor most aboriginal cultures distinguish the earliest poetry from song because they were interrelated art forms without much to differentiate.

Gioia points out that even though poets no longer face an audience to sing their poetry, they maintain the “physical imagery of live vocal performance” through metaphors to describe the art of poetry (8) because this vocal feature with the use of imagery carries “the power of song—both real and metaphorical—and its physical and emotional connection” to the reader (9). In a sense, a good poem with imagery and music boggles not just the mind for intellectual appreciation but is also pleasing to the ear for a physical reaction. That is why Gioia stresses, “Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection—without apology—to its musical and ritualistic origins” (9). In other words, music is the essential ingredient of poetic enchantment.

The power of music enchants the readers/audiences with a physical response. Gioia elaborates that “an essential part of poetry’s power has little connection to conceptual understanding. Poetry proffers some mysteries that lie beyond paraphrase” (12). One mystery is the relationship between dream and reality in poetry that “claims some power to connect the conscious and unconscious minds” (13). Gioia uses Surrealism as an example of this mysterious relationship, arguing that Surrealism aimed to connect the conscious and unconscious minds and to “reconcile dream and reality—a vision that haunted much of twentieth-century poetry” (13). 

Gioia compares the responses to poetry by average readers and professionals. He believes average readers approach poetry out of “love or curiosity” (14). He argues that though “entangled with half-formed thoughts and physical sensations,” average readers approach poetry in the way they “experience the world itself” (15). Their responses tend to be subjective, emotional, and physical, coming “closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary” (15) as academic responses try to be professional and accurate with insightful analyses.

Therefore, Gioia argues with a conviction that “literature has many uses, not all of which occur in a classroom” (15) even though “contemporary thinkers have enjoyed far more success in suppressing poetry by sequestering it in the classroom” (10). He further argues that intellectual analysis of poetry in the classroom is a secondary activity because there are far more reasons to use poetry in its basic way in ordinary lives. One basic way is that poetry has the feature of “pleasures of enchantment” because its power is to “affect the emotions, touch the memory, and incite the imagination with unusual force. Mostly through the particular exhilaration and heightened sensitivity of rhythmic trance can poetry reach deeply enough into the psyche to have such impact” (17). 

This unusual force is that poetry has its special way of using language to convey subtle meanings and possess auditory features appealing to the ear. Gioia points out that although poetic language is different in its use of imagery, figures of speech, and rhythm, its fundamental difference is how poetry communicates. Poetry is “holistic and experiential” (18). In this sense, features of poetic language work together to enchant listeners or readers to “heighten attention, relax emotional defenses, and rouse our full psyche, so that we hear and respond to the language more deeply and intensely” (17-18). This language aims to enhance our senses poetically and awaken our awareness of humanity intellectually. Yet, when poetry becomes a visual text in the classroom for discussion and analysis, we lose the chance to experience its enchantment that is “temporal, individual, and mostly invisible” (18).

Gioia moves on to the discussion of poetry retreating to the classroom by citing Robert Frost: “Why poetry is in school more than it seems to be outside in the world, the children haven’t been told. They must wonder” (19). We must wonder whether poetry still represents an elevated art form to express our understanding of humanity while it is no longer popular “outside in the world.” This is the topic Gioia discussed three decades ago in Can Poetry Matter? one of the most important books of the twentieth century, that “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group” (1). Here, in Poetry as Enchantment, Gioia uses parallelism to question the status quo of poetry that shows a contemporary paradox:

“If poetry is the most ancient and primal art, if it is a universal human activity, if it uses the rhythmic power of music to speak to us in deep and mysterious ways, if the art is a sort of secular magic that heightens the sense of our own humanity, then why is poetry so unpopular? Why has poetry, as so many instructors complain, become so hard to teach? Why is poetry disappearing from the curriculum at every level of education? Why has poetry gradually vanished from public discourse and the media? And, finally, why has all this happened—at least in most of Western Europe and North America—despite huge, ongoing investments from governmental, academic, and philanthropic institutions to support the creation, teaching, publishing, discussion, promotion, and preservation of poetry?” (19)

Gioia gives some reasons for this contemporary paradox. He claims poetry has been “too well taught” (21) due to the changes in poetic language in the early modernism of the twentieth century. Works like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land challenge academics to focus on poetic language “in the most compressed, allusive and challenging texts” that require analytical rigor and intellectual revolution in literary criticism (22-23). The impact hardens in classroom instruction which “gradually narrowed to a few types of textual analysis, increasingly taught to students with limited experiential knowledge of poetry” (23). This burden on analytical analysis is a successful challenge to intellectual minds; ironically it is a successful separation from the previous pedagogy that was “more eclectic, performative, and auditory” (23). 

As a professor who writes poems myself, I agree with Gioia that the current situation is that no matter how good a teaching method can be, it becomes distant from “the actual holistic, intuitive experience of poetry” (24) when poems are printed as texts for deconstructive analysis, which moves to intellectualize poetry into poetics no longer appealing to the public. However, poetry does need performative and auditory experience. A few years ago, in my Introduction to Poetry class, I required students to recite poems before we discussed them to feel the rhythm and assonance pleasant to the ear and watch Gioia’s poetry recitations on YouTube (which I felt was a good way for students to use smartphones). I also encouraged students to rap poetry in class. Maybe I taught poetry badly this way, but I felt it offered my students a chance to experience poetry by mouth and ear. Gioia is right that close reading is also necessary for helping students understand poetry aesthetically so they can better appreciate or memorize poetry. 

Enchantment is fundamental to poetry. The success of the Poetry Out Loud program established by Gioia when he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts confirms his “conviction that there is actually a widespread appetite for poetry—if the art can be made accessible and engaging. It also demonstrated the power of performative knowledge in humanistic education” (31). Yet, Gioia also questions whether poetry will regain its rigor and return to the “central position it once held” although four million high school students participated in Poetry Out Loud (32). Since it is unlikely for poetry to regain its central position, Gioia offers two suggestions. The first one is “to recognize the power of enchantment in teaching poetry” (32) with a combination of critical analysis and performative experience and a restoration of memorizing and reciting poetry. The second one is “to recognize … non-conceptual forms of knowledge, which are fundamental to all literature, especially poetry” (33). 

It can be imagined that when poetic enchantment is a necessary part of elementary school instruction, when recitation becomes regular in classrooms or on television, and when reading events become frequent in communities, poetry will likely return to being part of our public life. This can be fruitful with the help of state art agencies, teachers, and writers who take the responsibility “to create the next generation of readers” and prepare them with the intellectuality and physicality to appreciate poetry. This must be Gioia’s expectation of a “methodology with magic” (34) because poetry is enchantment.

~~~

Work Cited

Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Graywolf Press, 1992.

---

John Zheng (who also publishes under the name Jianqing Zheng) is a professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. His poetry collections include A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review Press, 2021) and The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville 2023).

Copyright 2025 John Zheng