Dana Gioia will leave the National Endowment for the Arts in January 2009, two years before his second term expires, the federal agency announced this morning. A poet with a knack for getting along with people in both political parties, Mr. Gioia has led the endowment for six years.

During that time, Mr. Gioia has pushed to make literature a bigger part of civic life through such programs as the Big Read and Poetry Out Loud. He has added a strong, often gloomy voice to public debates about the death of reading. During his tenure, the endowment issued two widely discussed reports, in 2004 and 2007, on the decline of literacy in American life.

Some critics have said the chairman has played it too safe in choosing which artistic projects to support. But in a recent interview with the Associated Press, he said he believed in seeking out “the highest artistic quality.”

“Controversy is not an intrinsic artistic concept; it’s a byproduct,” he said. “I can’t defend things that are wild and crazy for the sake of being wild and crazy. That doesn’t make much sense.”

After he leaves office, Mr. Gioia will work part time for the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit research and policy center. But mostly he hopes to resume more creative pursuits.

“Poets possess a very precarious creative gift; it can go bad or vanish easily,” he told the AP. “I like to remember there were some poets like Goethe, Milton, and Yeats who went into public life, then wrote their greatest work after they were leaving. Then you had Matthew Arnold, who went into public life and never wrote poetry again.” —Jennifer Howard