ABSTRACT
Society has both feared and dismissed poetry ever since Plato proclaimed that poets should be excluded from his republic because of their capacity to stir up trouble. Today, perhaps, poetry is more anachronistic than ever. While out of harmony with current instrumentalism, it no longer trails clouds of otherworldly glory. Detractors believe it variously to be dangerous, subversive, elitist, irrelevant,1 soporifi c, escapist, unnecessarily complex, and facile. They complain that lyricism is intrinsically narcissistic; that poetry privatizes reality; that it anaesthetizes, and is, therefore, complicit with violence and oppression; that it is a minority interest; and, conversely, that we are swamped with verse (Kinnell 1982, 219; Corbin 2001; Sweeney and Williams, 1997).2 These sceptics and those who ignore poetry entirely might wish to exclude it from the support of taxpayers or, indeed, exclude it from those places where young people might encounter it.
