Description
Book SynopsisIn these two essays, one of America’s most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. “I really don’t want to make a noise like a pundit,” Warren declares, “What I do want to do is to return us—and myself most of all—to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world.”
Trade ReviewA brilliant distillation of a long lifetime’s research on the relation of art and the social climate…
Democracy and Poetry ponders on ‘what Saint Augustine meant when he said that he was a question to himself.’ The question applies to us all, and so too does Mr. Warren’s answer: that each of us must become, by employing those strategies he calls poetry, not the victims but the makers of our history. -- Anatole Broyard * New York Times *
‘We are driving,’ observes Warren, ‘toward the destruction of the very assumption on which our nation is founded.’ His use of American literature to buttress this charge creates an inspired mini-anthology. By the book’s close, Warren’s defense of art becomes an antidote to the despondency he professes. Amid all the euphoria of the Bicentennial, this small volume concludes with a sharp, and, in the deepest sense, patriotic note. -- Paul Gray * Time *
Table of Contents* Foreward * America and the Diminished Self * Poetry and Selfhood * Notes
