Letter from Poetry Magazine
Letter to the Editor
BY Robert Longoni
Introduction
Too much of anything can erode our taste for it, and the dominant genre of any period is likely to produce the greatest number of inferior works. But observations of that kind do not justify condemning on aesthetic grounds either the genre or any of its characteristic features.
Dear Editor,
The Italian Poetry Portfolio [December 2007] touched on a controversial issue that keeps raising its head in current discourse — one that I think has created more confusion than light among critics and poets who fail to see, or choose to ignore, its complexity. I am referring
to the widespread dispute over what Gianluigi Simonetti calls “the lyric subject,” involving what some perceive to be the overuse, in poems today, of the pronoun “I,” or at least the dominance of the first-person consciousness or point of view in lyric poetry.