LIVE: WHY POETRY MATTERS (feat. Dana Gioia and Fred Turner) | Symposium 2023 Webinar

In advance of the 2023 National Symposium for Classical Education, the Great Hearts Institute is pleased to host participating speakers Dana Gioia (California State Poet Laureate 2015-2019) and Frederick Turner (University of Texas at Dallas, emeritus) for a LIVE conversation on the fortunes of poetry with ample opportunity for audience Q&A.
Don't miss this one-of-a-kind opportunity to dialogue with two masters of their craft and experience a preview of Symposium 2023!
Learn more about the National Symposium here: www.classicaleducationsymposium.org

[@MrTang-qo9wm]

Free verse isn't poetry. It's something else -- whatever that is, but it's always unsatisfying, never beautiful and, as far as I'm concerned, you can have it. Byron, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, even Roy Campbell (and NOT Eliot, oh my gosh) and Wilde's attempts at successful poems which didn't really get there, Robert Frost -- who mastered essential forms, made language musical without music, but with the peculiar melodies and rhythmic cadences of speech that one does not ever speak aloud in conversation: these are poets who wrote poetry. Free verse is to poetry what free jazz is to real jazz, as Dizzy Gillespie said, "Free of melody, free of music, free of everything, man!" And especially free of Beauty, that which is the sole Truth and motivation of the (real) Artist, which the modern world denies entirely.

[@niccoloflorence]

Something of the same is going on in prose; the most popular advice nowadays is to not make it beautiful but economical!