Maurice Manning: Defending Poetry (January 2006)

What is poetry? What does someone mean when she calls herself a poet? Implicit in these familiar questions, Maurice Manning suggests, is a suspicion of poetry, and he asks why poetry must be defended again and again. Manning draws on writing by Sidney, Milton, Keats, Rilke, William Carlos Williams, and August Kleinzahler to consider ways poetry has been defined and defended, and, offering his own defense, invites us to bathe in Keats’s “drainless shower of light.”