Poetry as Enchantment and Other Essays, Dana Gioia, Paul Dry Books, £22.99

Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry, Dana Gioia, Paul Dry Books, £15.99

Dana Gioia is one of the only serious American poets alive who can currently attract a large audience of normal people. When he gives a reading or a lecture, few of the people who show up are teachers, professors of literature or creative writing students. He doesn’t write for academics or would-be writers: his vocation is to create literature for common readers.

Gioia is famous for his provocative polemics about writing, such as ‘Can Poetry Matter?’, and ‘The Catholic Writer Today’. His Commencement Address for the Class of 2007 at Stanford University is arguably the most memorable speech of this sort so far in the 21st century. Its main competition, the novelist David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Commencement Address for Kenyon College, now seems dated. How does Gioia’s language retain its freshness?

Practical competence has been his salvation. Although he studied literature at Stanford and Harvard, Gioia holds an MBA from Stanford Business School. He had a successful career in business and has also served in the United States government, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. Yet he was surely happiest as Poet Laureate of the State of California between 2015 to 2019, visiting all 58 counties in the state and treating the job as a missionary project for literature. Despite his plainspoken manner, he is, at heart, an evangelist.

Gioia enjoyed an excellent classical education at a local parochial school, graduating just before the Catholic Church began committing institutional suicide. As a result of ill-advised reforms in the 1960s and 1970s, the Church destroyed, not just its ancient Latin liturgy, but most of its cultural traditions. Gioia sees it as his duty to preserve what remains of this now-fragile heritage, and plant the seeds of its restoration. In July 2024 he circulated a petition to help prevent the Vatican from imposing severe restrictions on the Latin Mass. He doesn’t see why others ought to be deprived of the experiences that helped him understand the world: aesthetic pleasure isn’t an end in itself, but a means of developing a taste for what is eternally true and absolutely good.

Gioia has always had a passion for poetry and music. He loved opera long before he had a chance to attend one, thanks to mid-century television and radio, which made high culture available to the masses to enable them to ‘improve’ themselves. But he had nobody to guide his discoveries; there were no cultural institutions within easy reach except the local public library. Since rising to prominence, he has taken it upon himself to act for others as the mentor that he never had when he was a teenager.

Gioia’s generous three-hour YouTube interview with the podcaster David Perell from February 2025 is essential viewing for any aspiring creative artist. But his most valuable instruction will be found in a series of recent books in which he shares with readers how he grew into his vocation. Poetry as Enchantment and Other Essays and Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry are part of an unofficial series of essay collections, along with Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs of a Young Writer’s Life and The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays. These are not pleasant strolls down memory lane: these are how-to guides that sometimes end in hard lessons.

Studying with Miss Bishop features vivid, affectionate anecdotes about Gioia’s personal relationships with the writers who helped form him, including Elizabeth Bishop and John Cheever. Poetry as Enchantment continues in this vein with a moving, perceptive and sometimes hilarious account of his master-disciple relationship with the eccentric poet-critic Donald Davie, whom he first met at Stanford in 1975. Davie was a Yorkshire evangelical who was slowly beginning to re-embrace Christianity at the time; Gioia does not shy away from detailing Davie’s weaknesses, but does so respectfully and with great warmth. He excels at this form of instruction in the form of a story.

Overall Gioia is not a ‘critical’ critic, but an appreciative one: he wants to show the reader what he gained from immersing himself in W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin and Robert Frost, as well as unexpected figures like the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, and marginal figures including the obscure New York poet Samuel Menashe, and Jack Foley, an amateur historian who has written an authoritative history of Californian poetry in the postwar period. He sees generosity as a duty: a review of the broadcaster Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems can fruitfully be compared to the poet August Kleinzahler’s enraged attack on the same volume. Gioia seeks allies, not enemies.

Weep, Shudder, Die further demonstrates alliance-building in a series of wide-ranging, often hilarious short essays exploring opera as a hybrid, collaborative art form. His insights into the relationship between a libretto and an operatic score are shrewd as well as funny. Yet the very best sections in the volume are the autobiographical passages that slyly, implicitly instruct the reader without seeming pretentious or didactic. They are disarming by conscious design.

All these volumes demonstrate a winningly youthful spirit. This must be one of the secrets to Gioia’s continuing growth and development as an artist. Recently he published a translation of Seneca’s tragedy The Madness of Hercules. This is the finest single rendition into English of any of Seneca’s work. The Madness of Hercules ought to have been published by a major house – Faber & Faber, say, or Ferrari, Straus and Giroux. Instead, Gioia gave it as a favour to Wiseblood Books, a tiny Catholic press. To any literary careerist this seems insane; but Gioia’s trust in Providence is the other secret to his art.