Observing that poetry is a natural part of our pastimes and rituals, Rukeyser opposes elitist attitudes and confronts Americans'fear of feeling. Multicultural and interdisciplinary, this volume makes an irrefutable case for the centrality of poetry in American life.

"The Life of Poetryis not easy reading, nor was it intended to be. At times its range may seem nervously scattering, and the lyric prose takes on a heavy supersaturation. Nonetheless, one must admire, even 17 years posthumously, a brilliant mind fiercely at work."-Liz Rosenberg, The New York Times Book Review

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Now poetry, at this moment, stands in curious relationship to our acceptance of life and our way of living.

The resistance to poetry is an active force in American life.... Anyone dealing with poetry and the love of poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry, and perhaps even more with the indifference which is driven toward the center. It comes through as boredom, as name?calling, as the traditional attitude of the last hundred years which has chalked in the portrait of the poet as he is known to this society, which, as Herbert Read says, "does not challenge poetry in principle-it merely treats it with ignorance, indifference and unconscious cruelty."

Poetry is foreign to us, we do not let it enter our daily lives. Do you remember the poems of your early childhood-the far rhymes and games of the beginning to which you called the rhythms, the little songs to which you woke and went to sleep?

Yes, we remember them.

But since childhood, to many of us poetry has become a matter of distaste. The speaking of poetry is one thing: one of the qualifications listed for an announcer on a great network, among "good voice" and "correct pronunciation," is the "ability to read and interpret poetry." The other side is told conclusively in a letter sent ninety years ago by the wife of the author of Moby?Dick.Mrs. Melville said to her mother-"Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."