My last post was about Auden's thought that "poetry makes nothing happen," which questions seeing poetry as political or able to change the world. But this month I also noted that Juliana Spahr won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her recent collection, Ars Poeticas, a politically charged meditation on poetry’s role in what she describes as “dark times.”
“Ars poeticas" literally means “art of poetry.” Her collection takes that title from the Roman poet Horace’s foundational treatise on the art of poetry, which has inspired a tradition across cultures and languages of poets writing their own “ars poeticas” - meta-poems that are meditations on the art of poetry itself.
Her book addresses ecological crises, the rise of authoritarian populism and the possibilities of collective care and resistance. Spahr, who is a professor of contemporary American literature at Northeastern University, follows developments across the nuclear age from the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb test in 1954 to today’s moment of crisis, species extinction, and political upheaval. In an interview, she described her book as moving into questions about poetry’s “social” role, broader utility, and even complicity in larger systems.
In “Will There be Singing,” she writes:
I thought for a while there were two sorts of poets.
Poets who write the terrible nation into existence
and poets screwing around doing something else.
Poets who write the terrible nation into existence
and poets screwing around doing something else.
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