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“As civilization advances,” the historian Macaulay observed, “poetry almost necessarily declines.” Today we have contrived to be both uninspired and barbaric. Our poetry is chiefly a matter of pop-rock lyrics, singing commercials, and prefabricated greetings. For the culturally advantaged poetry is the echo of a genteel tradition.
Recently there has been a revival of interest in poetry from an unexpected quarter — psychiatry. Psychoanalysis has long been applied to the study of artistic creativity and to the interpretation of specific works of art and literature (see Freud, Jones, Jung, Kris, Sachs, Waelder, and the collections edited by Phillips and Ruitenbeck). Currently attention has turned to poetry as a tool of psychotherapy (see Blanton, Leedy, Lerner, Rothenberg, and the sources cited in these works). Now that poetry is no longer nourishing or intoxicating it is being prescribed for its medicinal value.
If we are alienated from poetry it is because poetry has alienated itself from us. Poetry has always been involved with major concerns, welling up from every spring of passion in the life of a people. Today poetry has largely withdrawn into itself. Poets of national aspiration — like William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore and Chaim Nachman Bialik — belong to another generation. The struggle for equality, the other great driving force of our time, is virtually unknown in contemporary poetry, save in the ideological perspectives of a Pablo Neruda and a Yevgeny Yevtuchenko or in the clichés of the self-conscious Western voices of “protest.”
The crises of personal life, marked in every culture by rites of