The three decades following World War II were a time when poets could become famous, novelists could become rich, filmmakers could become Sophocles, and musicians could become gods. Those born after the war didn’t have it quite as good, but still fared much better than the average artist today. The younger generations have been deprived of their inheritance. 

So believe many famous cultural figures of the postwar era. A number of them, in the twilight of their careers, are looking for ways to hand down what was once freely given to them during the fat years. These big names couch their efforts in declinist terms: we are losing this, we are forgetting that. Martin Scorsese, the director of Mean Streets and Raging Bull, today curates film archives and promotes “visual literacy.” Camille Paglia, the notorious public intellectual, has spent half of her career writing textbooks. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, leveraging his status as Nobel laureate and ex-partner of a Spanish TV star, talks incessantly about the importance of reading and wrote a useful guide for young novelists. The late Harold Bloom went from publishing the esoteric The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 to the popular How to Read and Why in 2000. Even the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards piously invokes the blues tradition that formed him, praising figures like Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon Jefferson in interviews.

While generous, these efforts also suggest a mood, and it’s not a hopeful one. People today need to learn how to read; they need to become familiar with the cultural touchstones of the past. Basic stuff, but these artists and intellectuals feel the situation is dire enough to spend their final years promoting cultural literacy. 

Does this signal the end of a civilization, or merely the end of a generation finding it particularly hard to let go? For the heroes of postwar culture, the two are linked: they cannot let go until they meet their inheritors, the people who will pass on the fruits of the civilization they enjoyed and added to. But they don’t see many inheritors. To paraphrase William Faulkner, they write as though they’ve watched the end of man.

The poet Dana Gioia may not be the most famous of these “heroes,” but he is one of the most successful at achieving their valedictory aims. Gioia began his career in the late sixties, outside of academia, writing formal verse in an age that had grown bored of it. He established his reputation with five collections of poetry, three collections of essays, translations from Italian and Latin, opera libretti, and song lyrics. In 2001, he was appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, where he promoted high-school programs in the arts, music, and poetry recitation. He also mentors young writers, planting the seeds of a future literary renaissance. Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” holds the pre-internet Atlantic magazine record for generating the most mailed responses. In 2013, he published an influential manifesto in First Things, “The Catholic Writer Today.” Curiously, for an identity-obsessed time like ours, the Mexican-Italian Gioia has never been recognized as being a leading Hispanic American writer of his generation.

Gioia’s 2021 book Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life describes a tradition of cultural education that Gioia is fighting to preserve. Gioia admits that he grew up in a lost world: “My reminiscences take place when people still wrote letters and read newspapers. There were still phone booths, newsstands, and typewriters…. Cultural opinion was shaped by magazines and quarterlies. Many writers were genuine celebrities.” It was the 1970s, the twilight of a golden age: “In those exhilarating years, still electrified by the energy of the late sixties, my generation felt we lived on the edge of the future.” Needless to say, our present is not the future Gioia expected. 

Two pairs of complementary figures form the heart of the book, starting with two professors at Harvard. In a poetry seminar, Elizabeth Bishop taught Gioia to give priority to intuition over interpretation: “[T]he images and the music of the lines were primary. If we comprehended the sound, eventually we would understand the sense.” The sound of the sign leads to its meaning. For Bishop, “one did not interpret poetry, one experienced it.” Robert Fitzgerald, on the other hand, was a literary archaeologist. A bookish poet-scholar who translated the Odyssey, he became, for Gioia, the model of erudition. “He combined the classicist’s devotion to unraveling, word by word, the meaning of a passage with a poet’s delight in how the words work together to create a memorable effect.” Fitzgerald required his students to know at least two languages other than English; his “polyglot approach demonstrated how often poetic innovation in English resulted in borrowing an established convention from Latin, French, or Italian.” 

While Bishop and Fitzgerald taught Gioia how to read and enjoy a poem, John Cheever and James Dickey modeled the virtues and vices of a working writer: humility, resourcefulness, and their opposites. Cheever, the great New Yorker short-story writer, was a humble man. “Literary culture depends on trust,” Cheever told Gioia. A writer who gets lost in recondite visions or vain self-regard betrays that trust. In contrast, Dickey, a literary macho man in the mold of Hemingway and Mailer, was a case study of wounded pride. During a literary conference, he chased down Gioia to scold him for a negative review that Gioia published, years before, in a poetry journal. 

Although Goia presents these pairs as contrasts, the differences begin to blur from a present-day perspective. Cheever’s humility in comparison to Dickey’s insecurity, Bishop’s immediate experience over Fitzgerald’s erudition—these pale in importance to the dwindling of literary institutions that can grant writers any recognition at all, and the closing of humanities departments that can teach students how to prize either intuition or intellect. 

The final part of Studying with Miss Bishop recounts a story of thwarted ambition. Ronald Perry, a middle-aged advertising agent living in the Bahamas, published just one book of poetry and struggled to find a readership beyond a circle of literary friends in Miami. But Gioia came across the collection and after reading it, began corresponding with Perry, who had just started writing again after a long period of writer’s block. Perry died under mysterious circumstances, and Gioia was put in charge of administering Perry’s literary estate and publishing his poetry. Gioia finds this task fitting for a poet. He was able to “[broaden] the circle of memory,” and in so doing, to rescue his deceased friend from complete oblivion. “Remembrance is our métier,” he concludes. “After all, our Muse is the daughter of Memory.”

Gioia the poet’s relationship with the dead differs from that of Gioia the memoirist. Where the memoirist recovers portraits of the dead for the benefit of his living readers, the poet shows the psychic toll inflicted by the state of our culture in the mournfulness of his recent verse. The happy, if wistful, narrator of Studying with Miss Bishop becomes a melancholic surveyor of ruins in Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023). “On the streets of Hawthorne I sat down and wept,” begins “Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles,” which depicts the suburb Gioia grew up in. In his childhood, Hawthorne was working-class with a good library and decent schools. Returning decades later, the poet sees “a strange and empty land,” and “the old boulevard, where the shops / Had been condemned and demolished.” In “Psalm for Our Lady Queen of Angels,” referring both to the Virgin Mary and the city of his birth, the poet asks that we “[p]ray in the hour of our death each day / In the southern sun of our desecrated city.”

Like his memoir, Gioia’s poems conjure dead friends and ancestors. In the title poem, which alludes to a defunct jazz club on Hermosa Beach called “The Lighthouse,” the speaker summons his late friends for another night out. Chet Baker and Stan Getz will be playing, among others. “Let’s aim for the summer of ’71, / When all our friends were young and immortal.” Elsewhere, a declining empire becomes a metaphor for old age: “You study the map of your once vast empire / with its carefully engraved borders of vanished nations, / …The sun never sets on your nostalgia.” Despite the themes, Gioia’s tone is mostly tender, not morbid. Ted Ortiz, the intellectual uncle whose library Gioia inherited, is remembered in a touching lyric. In a long ballad, Gioia tells the story of his great-grandfather, a cattle rancher named Jesus Ortiz who died in a barroom brawl.

In one of the collection’s most difficult—and best—poems, “The Underworld,” Gioia includes a didactic, SparkNotes-like endnote: “This sequence makes allusion to Virgil, Seneca, Dante, Christopher Marlowe, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot, as well as Kelly Link and Clive Barker.” Alluding, perhaps, to Eliot’s own esoteric endnotes for “The Waste Land,” Gioia seems to be reaching out to the young reader failed by modern education, not lucky enough to learn from Robert Fitzgerald or Elizabeth Bishop. Follow these breadcrumbs, he seems to be saying. But that’s just one footnote; most of Meet Me at the Lighthouse invites the reader to overhear the poet’s conversation with himself.

Where memory in the mode of recovery guides Gioia’s memoir and leaves the reader hopeful, the poems tend toward escapism. Still, if we give in to nostalgia, they suggest, we can end up losing everything. At the end of the collection, the reader is left stranded in “The Underworld”—the last poem. When the dead enter the Underworld, the Greeks believed, Hades orders them to drink from the Lethe, the river of forgetting.

Old men are entitled to a little nostalgia, and Gioia isn’t the only postwar culture hero looking to escape, to some extent, into the past. Martin Scorsese plays with modes of memory in an essay called “Il Maestro,” an homage to Federico Fellini published in Harper’s in 2021. The essay begins as a screenplay set in 1959 Greenwich Village. A young man “gets in line for the Truffaut movie and opens his copy of the Voice to the Film section and a cornucopia of riches jumps from the pages and swirls around him.” But Scorsese’s nostalgia quickly gives way to polemic. Today, words like “cinema,” “form,” and “art” have no currency. Everything has been reduced to “content,” a word used by “the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should.” 

Mario Vargas Llosa offers an even darker view. “The Winds,” a short story from 2022, depicts the deteriorating memory of a flatulent old man as he ambles through a “paper-free” Madrid of the near future. Printed books are disappearing, eating meat is outlawed, and museums have digitized their content and closed their doors. The story begins at a public demonstration, where the hundred-year-old (or so) narrator and a handful of other seniors are protesting the closure of a movie theater. “No young person in Madrid cares that the last cinemas in the city are vanishing,” he reports. Several times, the narrator repeats himself, changes opinions without realizing it, and tries in vain to remember the names of past lovers and friends. He can’t decide whether his society is a free one, or whether “beneath the apparent differences the screens…defend a system in which government and business perpetuate a lie in common.” His memory disappears as his body breaks down. 

Like Gioia, both Scorsese and Vargas Llosa are at work on projects designed to preserve the cultural conditions for their own work’s survival. But they also share a hunch that, along with culture and art, individuality itself, or “the person” as an idea, is disappearing. For Scorsese, it’s the artist: “Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption,” he wrote in The New York Times. “Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist.” Vargas Llosa sees individuality disappear with the end of the novelist: “Since the practice arose of ordering up novels custom-written by computer…[y]ou can’t say there is even such a thing as a novelist anymore; or better said, all of us are novelists now. But that’s not true either. The only novelist on the planet still alive and kicking is the computer.” In his famous 1996 Harper’s essay about the death of the novel, Jonathan Franzen quotes another midcentury hero, Don DeLillo, who reached the same conclusion: “If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end.”

These men all have the same fear: a future without culture and art. Because culture is a byproduct of human life, and high culture is commonly the product of individual talent, the future these men fear is also a future without the individual. I don’t mean a future where the human race dies out—though obviously that would imply the end of all culture. Rather, I mean a future where human beings forget crucial aspects of their humanity, certain habits or actions that make culture possible. They may also lose the ability to reflect upon feeling and thought, question their finite condition, rebel against it, and pray—in short, they may stop doing the things which are the fuel of art and culture.

“In the future a totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from anything we can now imagine,” George Orwell wrote in 1932. “Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship.” But for the heroes of postwar culture, the primary threat to art and cultural transmission is technology, not censorship. This is because technology threatens individuality. 

The heroes of postwar culture thrived thanks to a few crucial technologies, most of which we take for granted: mass-market paperbacks, motion-picture cameras, phonographs, magnetic tape, portable tape recorders, vinyl discs, electric guitars, television. Today, the same people complain about screens and computers and the internet. They have drawn a line between technologies they like, which enhanced their careers, and those they despise, which destroyed the cultural ecosystem in which they flourished. To some, they are hypocritical old fogies. Cultural NIMBYs. Privileged Boomers hectoring against the dying of the light. 

Maybe. But in a matter of years, we’ll see whether they’re right. “The gods sense the future, men what happens, the wise what is approaching,” goes an ancient Greek saying. What do these cultural heroes foresee? Their basic complaint is that information technology has advanced beyond the point of enhancing human creativity and individuality, and is now working to replace both. 

In January of 2024, Ted Gioia, a prolific music historian and culture critic (and Dana’s brother), declared: “There was a period when new tech improved the quality of life, but that time has now ended.” The next month, he woke up to discover an AI-generated remix of his life’s work by “Frank Gioia” for sale on Amazon. This was an especially appalling experience for Ted, who has in recent years made a name for himself as a critic of Big Tech and its attempts to colonize humanistic culture, a process he has described as a war between microculture and macroculture. Microculture is human art and literature. Macroculture is the aggregated, reconfigured, commodified and sold version of the same. Microculture is produced by real human beings, while corporations drive macroculture. One way to understand the end of culture is to imagine a future where microculture is completely subjugated by macroculture, and human creativity is replaced by AI, as is already happening on platforms like Spotify and YouTube. One can hardly blame people for fearing this future when, for Ted Gioia at least, it’s already here.

Where Dana Gioia is wistful in Studying with Miss Bishop and somber in Meet Me at the Lighthouse, he turns programmatic and optimistic in his latest essay collection, Poetry as Enchantment. In his essays, Los Angeles is no longer wreckage to be lamented but the cultural model for the future, because it is “populist,” “decentralized,” and “contradictory.” And though “the grim facts” about reading and literacy seem “apocalyptic,” they do not measure “what currently matters” in poetry. What matters is its endurance through poetry slams and hip hop, and in the possibilities opened up by underemployed academics dissatisfied with “crappy jobs,” who might yet do something to renew the culture. 

Following his teacher Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia believes that the academic establishment has helped kill poetry by teaching it “too well” and neglecting the pre-theoretical, untutored experience of poetry. The musical pleasure of language and the enchantment of poetry “awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive.” Thus the power to reinvigorate the human person and renew our culture is already latent in poetry itself, which must be the true engine behind any cultural program or strategy of renewal. Poetry reminds us of what it means to be human, and it is back to Gioia the poet that we must return for hope. 

The art of poetry, as Gioia conceives of it, is bound up with the art of memory. As he puts it in Christianity and Poetry, a recent monograph, “Poetry is language designed to be remembered.” Accordingly, the building blocks of poetry, words themselves, are the key to a renewal of memory. For computers, words are mere signs—inputs that trigger outputs—but for human beings, they are something more. In the poem, “Words, Words, Words,” from Meet Me at the Lighthouse, the poet writes:

It isn’t just the words, though we have made 

a science of them. Eloquence excels 

in polishing the sentiments we need 

no longer say. 

Words are the cards, not why the game is played.

At first, this might appear to disenchant words—to assert that they are merely signs, not magical amulets. Do not confuse the sign with the reality that it points one toward. Yet the fact that a word can transport us to a thing, or give us a glimpse of the past, is a power that we should not take for granted. It is a power that can change the world. Another poem, from Interrogations at Noon, Gioia’s first anthology, begins: “The world does not need words. It articulates itself.” This lyric, which is titled “Words,” expresses the power inherent in words:

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

From this second poem, one gleans both that human beings wield a powerful tool when they use a word to name something, and that words are primarily focused on the present moment. Naming and knowing are actions that keep us rooted in the present. I name something only in experience, as I encounter it, and such encounters can only take place here and now. When I recall something from the past—when I remember it—and then give it a name, I am bringing it to the forefront of my mind in the present. I am making it present again. In this, Gioia follows Augustine of Hippo, for whom memory was not a trek back in time, but a harvest of images of the past within the present.

Never forget, Gioia is telling us, the enchantment involved in poetry and the mystery involved in words: the names that catch reality like a butterfly net, the words that peer backward and forward in time, the way naming and poetry engage our memories, and the power memory has to bring back the dead. The inheritors of culture will be those who are enchanted by the word, and, through it, remember what it means to be human. 

Studying with Miss Bishop
Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life
Dana Gioia
Paul Dry Books
$13.56 | 184 pp.

Meet Me at the Lighthouse
Poems
Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press
$16 | 72 pp.

Poetry as Enchantment
And Other Essays
Dana Gioia
Paul Dry Books
$17.56 | 272 pp.

Christianity and Poetry
Dana Gioia
Wiseblood Books
$9 | 40 pp.