The engines that have driven poetry's institutional success — the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines a… - Dana Gioia

“The writer needs good works—good literary ones” (33).

Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance — perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.

There is a special irony that this disappearance [of Catholic artists visibility despite Catholics constituting one-quarter of the US population] has occurred during a period when celebrating cultural diversity has become an explicit goal across the American arts. Some kinds of diversity are evidently more equal than others.