Atlantic Unbound | Poetry Pages | 2001.04.11

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Appreciations: "Prufrock, J. Alfred Prufrock" (April 11, 2001)
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Review: The Voice of the Poet-Critic (April 11, 2001)
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More on poetry in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly.

More on books, literature, and the arts in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly.

Atlantic Unbound | April 11, 2001

Editor's Note

Poetry and the Web

A personal view, five years later

.....

ive years ago this month, my colleagues and I launched The Atlantic Monthly's online Poetry Pages, billed as "a multimedia feature devoted to poets and poetry, both classic and contemporary." The Web was young (it still is, of course), and hopes for it were high. There was an idealism in the air that was contagious and exhilarating. Yet somewhere just beneath the surface of our heady optimism lurked the suspicion that while yes, to be sure, the Internet represented an unprecedented, undreamed of opportunity to make literature more readily available to the world, and in new ways, it also represented an unprecedented (if untested) opportunity for commerce—and that the two, literature and commerce, would not necessarily sit any more comfortably together in the new media than in the old.

From the Unbound archive:

The Matter of Poetry (April 1996)
Introducing The Atlantic Monthly's online Poetry Pages. By Wen Stephenson We were right. The boom and bust of the "Internet economy" has overshadowed a remarkable flowering of online literary activity—of which this Web site is just a small part—and has created an atmosphere in which the Web's cultural significance is neglected as we focus relentlessly on its economic ups and downs. The stock market tumbles. Fortunes evaporate. Poetry remains.

In an essay published around the time that we were launching The Atlantic's Web site, in the fall of 1995, I tried to put this feeling of optimism coupled with foreboding into a paragraph:

It is becoming clearer that the Internet has vast potential to expand the audience for works of the literary imagination.... But I know it is more likely that the Internet will become a vast cyberspace mall, every bit as commercialized as any other mass medium in a free-market society.... For this reason, it is all the more important that we do not surrender cyberspace and the new media to the purely market-driven forces of late-twentieth-century multinational capitalism. There are other values—values which cannot be measured in monetary units—that will survive only if we vigilantly carve out a space for them to breathe.

The point was (and still is) that it is up to publishers to make the Internet—quickly becoming humanity's next dominant communications medium—habitable for literature. Individual writers, as we've seen, can publish as much and as often as they like on the Web. But only publishers have the resources and the expertise—and the institutional mission—to nurture and sustain a vital literary culture.

I can hear it already: "Literary culture"? What a quaint, precious concept. What century are you living in?

Yes, in the twenty-first century the concept of a literary culture is quaint and precious—it has become so in the past fifty years thanks to the tyranny of the visual and the immediate, of art as "content" and thought as "information." It doesn't have to be that way, however. And in fact there are pockets of resistance, individual readers who still yearn for a connection and a communication that strikes deeper into the consciousness, to say nothing of the conscience, than anything expressed in a Hollywood jump-cut or a Washington soundbite.

A literary culture may reside first and foremost in the printed word. But the digital word, both written and spoken, can be the printed word's most formidable ally—if we give it the chance. This, I would like to think, is what our efforts in the Poetry Pages, and in Atlantic Unbound as a whole, have been all about: the Internet as essential, inescapable companion to the book and the literary magazine in the digital age.

—Wen Stephenson

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Wen Stephenson has served as editorial director of The Atlantic Monthly's Web site, and of its online journal, Atlantic Unbound, since 1996. He is stepping down next month.