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Reviving the Love of Poetry: Camille Paglia
Although her notoriety rests on being a renegade, Paglia need not be embarrassed that her book sheds more light than heat (from the Los Angeles Times Book Review)
Camille Paglia’s radical agenda is to win undergraduates (and the general public) back to poetry. Who better to do this than the renegade literary critic and author of Sexual Personae, who showed she could take up Emily Dickinson and Madonna in the same sentence, this cultural spokeswoman and media celebrity whose name even appears in her new book’s subtitle.
In Break, Blow, Burn, Paglia contends that poetry has fallen on hard times in the United States. Contemporary poets, subsidized by self-interested and academic cliques, have become affected and precious. Poetry readings are exercises in narcissism; even the current craze of “slams” amounts to a pathetic bid for attention by annexing poetry to hip-hop.
But the real culprit in poetry’s demise, she suggests, is a new generation of professors who have sold their souls to Jacques Derrida and other effete French critics. Venerating theory-about-poetry over poetry itself, these solipsists bore students with their quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo. The love of poetry is in danger of being lost.
