“The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. . . . Take off the fond doting . . . I say bee not deceived by these pompes, empty shewes, and faire representations of goodly condition before the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons.” - John Cotton

This quote is by a seventeenth-century Puritan named John Cotton, and it goes right to the heart of one of America's biggest problems as a culture. We have a legacy and a tradition of anti-intellectualism, as exemplified recently by Presidential candidate Herman Cain's “we need a leader, not a reader.”

This is ultimately why Americans don't care about poetry. In other countries all over the world, poetry is a major part of the overall cultural landscape. Cab drivers in some countries can quote long passages from their nation's greatest poets. Poetry in a lot of other cultures is seen as something very special, something with a hint of the sacred about it.

In America, it's always been seen as evidence that you might be a little bit “off,” if not an outright homosexual communist. Even among intelligent and otherwise educated people, poetry is seen as being completely removed from their daily lives. And the poets have responded by making it worse, retreating into a self-congratulatory and self-destructive elitist subculture, obsessed with its own “otherness” or its own erudition. To even be able to read some of the poetry in our most influential journals, you have to be able to speak two or three languages and understand references to obscure bits of Renaissance Italian literature. It's as if the authors have been so stung by American anti-intellectualism that they have reflexively decided to make as much of a display of their own elitism as they can possibly manage.

Somewhere in between ignorant anti-intellectualism and pointless displays of extreme erudition, there has to be a space for people to be able to discover what much of the rest of the world already knows- poetry is an indispensable element of any culture with any depth to it. Until America comes to terms with poetry, we will never be able to claim to be a true civilization.