"I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry"
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Jarrell’s jab lands because it sounds less like nostalgia for meter and more like a diagnostic of cultural muscle atrophy. “Modern culture,” in his framing, isn’t defined by technology, politics, or even moral decline, but by a narrower, more embarrassing failure: the people paid (or praised) to think can’t do one of the most basic acts of attention. The cruelty is in the specificity. Not “don’t like poetry,” not “don’t write it,” but “can’t read any.” He’s accusing the intellectual class of a kind of illiteracy that hides behind credentials.
The “nine-tenths” is doing rhetorical work: exaggerated enough to sting, plausible enough to make you glance around your own cohort. Jarrell, a poet and critic with a wartime sense of catastrophe, is pushing back against a mid-century American intelligentsia increasingly oriented toward sociology, policy, and prestige nonfiction - arenas where argument and data can substitute for ear, ambiguity, and felt complexity. Poetry, for him, is the stress test: it demands patience with compression, the ability to hold conflicting meanings, the willingness to be moved without immediately converting that feeling into an opinion.
Subtext: a culture that can’t read poetry will still produce “ideas,” but they’ll be blunt instruments - all thesis, no sensorium. Jarrell isn’t worshipping poems as ornaments; he’s arguing that the loss of poetic literacy signals a broader loss of interior life, and that our intellectuals, of all people, should be the last ones to accept that bargain.
The “nine-tenths” is doing rhetorical work: exaggerated enough to sting, plausible enough to make you glance around your own cohort. Jarrell, a poet and critic with a wartime sense of catastrophe, is pushing back against a mid-century American intelligentsia increasingly oriented toward sociology, policy, and prestige nonfiction - arenas where argument and data can substitute for ear, ambiguity, and felt complexity. Poetry, for him, is the stress test: it demands patience with compression, the ability to hold conflicting meanings, the willingness to be moved without immediately converting that feeling into an opinion.
Subtext: a culture that can’t read poetry will still produce “ideas,” but they’ll be blunt instruments - all thesis, no sensorium. Jarrell isn’t worshipping poems as ornaments; he’s arguing that the loss of poetic literacy signals a broader loss of interior life, and that our intellectuals, of all people, should be the last ones to accept that bargain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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