Naming and Taming the Truth: Dana Gioia’s Transformative Poetry

This essay attempts to trace the ways in which Dana Gioiaʼs use of form relates to, and simultaneously differs from Romanticism, Modernism and postmodernism. His particular brand of formalism takes up the notion of a connection between truth and beauty, without presuming to identify one with the other, and, at the same time, resisting both the Modernist obsession with dissolution and fragmentariness and postmodernism’s skepticism towards grand narratives. Form becomes a coalescing agent, uniting different aspects and levels of reality, and narratives are instrumental in shaping both the individual and the social body. The power to name (point to and describe) and to tame (to translate dark or incomprehensible aspects of reality), inherent in language, is the means by which poetry shapes our social and cultural world.