I asked Dana Gioia what he learned from great writers. Here are his answers: Bob Dylan changed the nature of pop music. He gave us the images to understand the kind of weird industrial urban environment that we find ourselves in.  Marsh McLuhan understood, before anybody else, that the media that we use have spiritual dimensions that we experience but we don't explain. Baudelaire saw that all of us sometimes feel like we’re heading downhill and can't stop it. He turns that feeling into the subject of his poetry. — @DanaGioiaPoet