The Value of Poetry

The Value of Poetry shows how and why poetry matters in the contemporary world and demonstrates what poems can offer to twenty-first century readers. It argues that poems are vital spaces in which the complexities of thought, feeling, and memory are shaped and displayed, and that poems offer unique and crucial forms of readerly experience.

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Eric Falci's The Value of Poetry offers an evaluation and critique of the literary, cultural, and political value of poetry in the twenty-first century. Falci claims that some of the most vital, significant, and enduring human notions have been voiced and held in poems. Poems marble civilizations: they catch courses of thought, tracks of feeling, and acts of speech and embed these shapes in language that is, in some fashion, poised toward the future. Falci argues that poetry is a vital medium in addressing and understanding some of the most pressing issues of our time. Ranging widely across canonical and contemporary poetry, The Value of Poetry shows how poems matter, and what poetry offers to readers in the contemporary world.