Why critics praise bad poetry

W hen critics play parlor games, they imagine how they would have reviewed the controversial books of the past. Critics are later judged, not by the book they failed to pan, but by the book they failed to praise. Most are certain that, given the chance, they would have recognized the genius of Lyrical Ballads , or Leaves of Grass , or The Waste Land. The critics like the poets themselves were creatures of their day, and subject to the prejudices of the day. The reviewer is most vulnerable facing a poetry that threatens convention—violations of form and formality tend to provoke the most ill-considered judgments.

Yet even there, after you have adjusted for bias, the critic can be uncannily canny about the poetry itself. Such contemporary insight is important not just for its punctuality. The reviews expose how the poets failed the time—or how their time failed the poets.

Only by knowing how critics resisted the work can we see what the poetry put in danger. The first review of Leaves of Grass was written by Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Daily Tribune. The idea that poetry has a proper language had been invoked against Lyrical Ballads half a century before and would be repeated against Howl a century after. T he diction of English poetry has gone through many cycles of contraction and release, when the fashion of one day has hardened into the law of the next—just as certain styles of clothing have fossilized into custom, like the vestments of Catholic priests, some of them more than a millennium old.

More telling are periods when taste reversed direction, so that fifty years after his death Shakespeare was rewritten for the delicate tongue, and more than a century after that bowdlerized for the delicate ear.

The judgment is a matter for social history and psychology; even if our ancestors never stitched skirts around piano legs, there was a nicety to language we should now think absurd. We moderns are not yet above such arguments, with the insistent self-censorship of television, newspapers, and magazines even the New Yorker long maintained a list of banned words.

Though Norton was prepared to believe that Whitman was what he claimed to be—an American rough—he had his doubts whether the poet was a kosmos.

Honest critics doubt that still. The British, who took to Whitman more eagerly than the Americans, were not immune to exaggerated complaint. The Fejee Mermaid was another humbug, but a fake. Here are the goblets filled with wine. The smell of sunlight fading from the stones. She complicates the ideas she offers most clearly, to enrich the basic mysteries.

The astronomer gazes out one eye at a time to a sky that expands even as it falls apart like a paper boat dissolving in bilge. Yale University Press. Paperback, 96 pages.

One reason for the dearth of critical comeuppances is that even bad poems are often hard to understand and harder to understand conclusively, so negative critics risk missing something and looking like fools.

They misinterpret what they malign, they butcher what they slander. While the perspective is clouded with obscurity it is may as well be discarded. Reviews should be commentary and critical so the reader can base an opinion. False dichotomy if the choice is between negative or fawning.

A good review established a resonance with the work. The social experience of reading is illuminated. The reviewer must reveal his or her shared but inner moment with the poetry, not be an authority on what is good or bad. Privacy and Cookies Policy. Supported by Arts Council England. Share this. I want reviews that are themselves art. I want reviews cause me to feel without bamboozling me. Older comments. All Rights Reserved.