Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry
Chapter One
CULTURE
The term "culture" with its old agricultural and biological connotations
has taken on a new, surprising centrality. In world affairs and in
American electoral politics, in geopolitical analysis and in economics,
culture has become a kind of ulterior cause of causes. It has been
proposed that culture determines the power of a nation to achieve economic
development, and that cultural more than political differences underlie
electoral contests and atrocities, economic trends and terrorist acts.
Cultural clashes seem to have replaced ideological strife. Even the
directions and conceptions of science have been seen in cultural terms.
Far from resisting this trend, I want to consider the voice of
poetry-emphasizing its literal or actual "voice"-within the culture of
American democracy, amid the tensions of pluralism.
The art of poetry has many of its roots in hierarchical, pre-democratic
culture: the flirtations and imperial visions of European courts; the
monkish preservations of scholars, the wistful, stylized perception of
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