A turn for the verse.

Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems, by Camille Paglia (Pantheon, 272 pp., $20)

IN the ongoing cultural catastrophe, without doubt poetry has suffered the most. While our museums sometimes feel like Penn Station at rush hour, our concert halls are packed with geezers, Oprah Winfrey makes bestsellers out of One Hundred Years of Solitude and East of Eden, and new buildings can turn architects into international celebrities, poetry alone has succumbed to oblivion. At mid-century, T. S. Eliot filled the football stadium at the University of Minnesota; today, few college students could tell you who T. S. Eliot was. Oh, what a falling off was there!

What accounts for poetry's loss of prestige? Camille Paglia thinks she knows: Owing to the life-sucking influence of sophistic "literary theory," poets no longer speak the American vernacular. Today's poetry is "stale" and "derivative," and today's poets inhabit a self-referential, cliquish universe. Literature professors, meanwhile, no longer know how to read and teach verse. They pride themselves on being able, as they like to put it, to "problematize" the text, but poetry is polysemous by nature--that is, it already has multiple meanings and invites the reader to explore its ambiguities. Academics no longer have any use for poetry, and it is consigned to the basement of culture--where the great poems sit, unexplored, unexplained, and unappreciated.

In the hands of a skilled and intelligent critic, however, poetry may become exciting again. As if to prove the point, Camille Paglia, the consummate enfant terrible, has written Break, Blow, Burn.

Probably nobody in America actually agrees with Paglia about anything. Her contempt for banal left-wing pieties on questions of sex and race, and her admiration of Western civilization, have incensed the Left, but her fancy for all things pagan and transgressive (including, she proclaims with impressive consistency, pop culture) makes cultural conservatives queasy. She may want to save Western culture, but only by showing how much more dangerous and subversive it is than anything that can pretend to displace it.

Her latest work--a collection of 43 poems with brief accompanying critical essays--is vintage Paglia: bracing, opinionated, and deliciously enjoyable. In her hands, poetry has the seductive scent of forbidden fruit. As she has before, she adverts often to themes of human sexuality, domination, and homoeroticism (though she can display a surprising and warm appreciation for the charming devotional verse of a George Herbert). But even as she delights in making poetry appear subversive, Paglia aims self-consciously at a middlebrow audience. For all its intellectual derring-do, her book hopes to bring back the day when ordinary people read and understood poetry. Perhaps she is less transgressive than we--or she--thought.

Pithy and persuasive, her close readings both illuminate the texts and teach us, by example, how to read them. She offers fresh readings of old favorites--Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us"--and introduces lesser-known 20th-century works from the likes of Gary Snyder, Wanda Coleman, and Norman H. Russell.

I particularly enjoyed her discussion of John Donne's "Holy Sonnet I," in which the poet demands and receives the attention and saving power of God ("Thou hast made me, and shall thy worke decay?" rings out the first line). Death approaches, and the poet's sins weigh heavily:

   Despaire behind, and death before doth
      cast
   Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth
      waste
   By sinne in it, which it t'wards hell doth
      weigh;

"Weigh," explains Paglia, marks the poem's nadir. Through the heavy, sinking vowel, the reader experiences the downward pull of hell. But God does not abandon this sinner; redemption is nigh:

   Onely thou art above, and when towards
      thee
   By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe ...
   Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his
      [Satan's] art,
   And thou like Adamant draw mine iron
      heart.

Paglia writes: "The sonnet's allegorical climax is cinematic, like the windswept episodes of Dante's Inferno. The faltering soul is snatched in midair by the dove with beating wings.... Sonnet's end is the finality of salvation, when time stops and eternity begins.... The poet's impure heart, having shed its envelope of 'feeble flesh,' is drawn toward God's adamantine touch, which turns iron into spiritual gold."

She is an ingenious interpreter of Donne. Drawing back from the minute details of the sonnet, she shows how the poem as a whole forms a "cruciform emblem": "The earthly horizontal--Donne's path from yesterday's fleshpots to tomorrow's tomb--is crossed by the embattled vertical extending from heaven to hell."

Like all the best critics, Paglia mixes measured assessments with bold critical sallies. Of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," she writes, "Because of its vast historical vision and agonizing pantomime of passion and conflict, [it] can justifiably be considered the greatest poem of the 20th century." Perhaps you would nominate another for "greatest of the 20th century," but Paglia makes a compelling case. In her view, Yeats elevated the widespread disillusionment of artists and intellectuals following World War I to cosmic proportions: "Neither Zeus nor Leda is named in the text itself, so that the scene becomes archetypal: The poem records a pivotal moment of contact between humanity and divinity." Indeed, Yeats's line, "Agamemnon dead," foretells the very cultural catastrophe that Paglia and others hope to prevent: When, as today, educated people don't even know the names of dead Greeks like Agamemnon, Western civilization may already have died.

Even as she makes the occasional sweeping judgment, Paglia never overwhelms the poems with her presence. Her voice, though strong, defers always to the works themselves, which is exactly what one would expect from someone who wants to revive the New Criticism. In the 1930s, New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren began to look at the poem as an autonomous artifact, explicable on its own terms, without reference to the author's background and psychology. Though neither Paglia nor the New Critics ignore historical context entirely, they rightly focus on the poem's formal elements. Paglia's criticism stands out as an example of the coherence and promise of this literary tradition.

Of course, you may not agree with Paglia that Rochelle Kraut's "My Makeup" is really one of the "world's best poems," as the subtitle of Paglia's book promises. And perhaps you, like me, are not as enamored of Emily Dickinson as Paglia is, or can't stand much of what Walt Whitman wrote. (Thankfully, Paglia spares us the conventional wisdom that Whitman created a uniquely American voice. On the contrary, most Americans, if they took the time to think about it, would regard him as an insufferable egomaniac, and, if he ever showed up, would ride him out of town on a rail.) Whatever one's tastes, however, Paglia's provocations are always good fun.

Yet Paglia is also a woman on a mission. She swims against strong academic currents, and nothing less than the survival of the humanities is at stake. "Custodianship, not deconstruction, should be the mission and goal of the humanities," avers Paglia in the preface. But she pursues a further aim, beyond tidying up and dusting off the scattered mess of objects that postmodernism has left of English poetry: "As a student of ancient empires, I am uncertain about whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it. Hence it is critical that we reinforce the spiritual values of Western art, however we define them." Call Break, Blow, Burn Paglia's contribution to the War on Terror.

One needn't worry when the first "poetry" she quotes, a few pages in, is a 1950s jingle for Peanut M&Ms. There isn't beauty, or poetry, in all things, but those who--like Paglia--love the English language and seek it out wherever it is used with verve will find it from time to time under the bushel of popular culture. (In a similar vein, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney has praised the "verbal energy" of rap star Eminem's lyrics.) Thoughtful conservatives ought not to ignore popular culture entirely, lest they--like the contemporary poets Paglia excoriates-lose hold of the American vernacular and fall into stale and derivative thinking.

Paglia achieves great things in this small volume, but she leaves us hungering for more poetry and more criticism--Where, oh where, are Keats and Pope? one finds oneself demanding. Perhaps Paglia has a sequel in the works; perhaps she has made enough of a demonstration in this volume to inspire even the most poetry-averse. In either case, she has done culture a great service.

Sarah Bramwell is a freelance writer living in New York.