critical blindspots

The kind of conservative critic who wouldn’t have recognized most of the canon had he lived during the times when the works were written.

captains courageous

The courage of good criticism.

weak critic

A critic who only took on books by no-accounts so as not to offend any of the gatekeepers.

monocular vision

Imagine a person wearing a monocle: the image of a bad critic with a single critical lens engaged on a work.

grape to raisin

Don’t be the critic who makes a raisin from a grape.

bias in us

Just as we have unconscious/implicit bias in social settings, we also must own them when we’re confronted with works of art. No critic is without them.

two-way street

One can only hold the critic to account when he quotes from the text on which he expounds.

unable to suffer further

The critic had wanted to write a scathing review but, being a person of character, he was unable to do so—realizing he’d closed the book only a few pages in.

not too pure

Cleanse your spirit of spleen, my teacher said, before exercising your function as critics. Not that the voiding of spleen doesn’t pose certain dangers: there are some souls who have nothing else to offer, who run the risk of blanking themselves out with purgation. “Be pure, be pure, and evermore be pure: but be not too pure,” for we live in essential impurity. Melancholia, black bile—asta bilis—has joined with the poet more than once to produce imperishable pages. There is no need to begrudge the critic a little melancholy. Nonetheless, a little soap here, a little swab there have their place in the household of literature.

Antonio Machado, Juan De Mairena* (Univ. of California Press, 1963), edited and translated by Ben Belitt

*‘Juan De Mairena’ was a pseudonym of Machado's. The Marirena persona being a provincial professor of rhetoric, philosophy and literature. The subtitle of this book: Epigrams, Maxims, Memoranda, and Memoirs of an Apocryphal Professor with an Appendix of Poems from The Apocryphal Songbooks.

artist impoverished

[Paul Léautaud] was mean, slanderous, and cruel; he could also display generosity and great delicacy in his judgments. Even at his most caustic there was a simplicity, an absence of vanity, rare in a writer. He talked about death and love, authors and actors, Paris and poetry, without rambling, without moralizing, without a trace of bitterness for having fallen on hard times. He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist. Léautaud, at rock bottom, still had his credentials. His monumental diary "Journal Littéraire", which he kept for over 50 years, can without exaggeration be described as the greatest study of character ever written.

—Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks (Stoddart, 1988), 143.

no mail

The epistolary poem was marked ‘Return to Sender’.

literary lineage

A critic who could take any new poet and show the links to all her/his literary lineage.

feeling it

Critic, never be too smart to feel.

of im and in

The reviewer is concerned with impressions, the critic with insights.

open book critic

It’s okay to be a disagreeable critic as long you can convince the reader that your opinion may be flawed and you’re still open to being awed.

critical concern

The critic worried that after his take-down of the Apollonian poet he might be smitten with donkey ears.

first rule of criticism

A critic must not corrupt the text with invented material.

critic types

A thug critic, a theory critic, a thiswayandorthat critic.

preferred if not perfect

As a critic he knew not to expect perfect, but he knew what to prefer.

known unknown

The poet always knows more about the poem than you do.