Maggie's Farm

Is all poetry lyrical poetry? Does it matter? In my view, poetry (and drama) are meant to be heard, not read. I am not, however, a professor of literature.

Why poetry should be heard, not seen:

Gioia writes: “I suspect one thing that hurt poetry was being too well taught.” While professing his admiration for them, Gioia blames the “New Critics” of the mid-20th century — “R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Yvor Winters” — for inadvertently alienating the public by inspiring generations of teachers to treat poems as difficult texts to be deciphered like the Rosetta Stone, rather than as enjoyable scripts for oral performance. Poetry was less like dance or drama than like philology or philosophy.