Value of Poetry

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.

'Drawing on an ample range of contemporary sources, Falci explores how poetry uses its formal wiles and intuitive craft to respond to the world it must answer to and which inflects its thinking, language choices and physical stance. A stylish, provocative and exhilarating book, it will serve both poets and readers to probe the effects of a good poem, and how it succeeds in achieving them.' Vona Groarke, The University of Manchester, 'This is a formidably intelligent, packed, articulate and rewarding book...Conceptually omnicompetent in poetics, it is also, in its local observations, technically precise and questioning. It is a state-of-the-art investigation which is also independent and takes nothing for granted.' John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge, 'A powerful, eloquent defense of poetry, alive to its intricacy, complexity, and variety, this book offers a riveting account of poetry's special strengths and capacities. Falci illuminates poetry's play, materiality, and formal resources; its staging of subjectivity's fractured multiplicity; its intertwining of thought and feeling; and its drive to recollect the irretrievable past. Grounded in rich, multivalent readings of contemporary poems of many different kinds, this is one of the very best recent books on poetry.' Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia

Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 (2012) and the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (2015), as well as a number of essays on twentieth-and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry. Along with Paige Reynolds, he is the co-editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 (2020). His first book of poetry, Late Along the Edgelands, appeared in 2019.