two-way street

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

dig site

The critic approached a poem like the site of an archeological dig. Much time, care and cataloging was involved in unearthing its artifacts.

describe or explain

The subject was science, and I heard a useful distinction made between ‘describing’ and ‘explaining’. The former is more open to alternative interpretations of what the thing/phenomenon is, showing us what there is to experience. The latter is more closed, trying to say why it is and why it is the way it is.

critique carry forward

The critique of this poem may not matter; however, that critique may inform the next poem.

prison argot

The critics of that school feared they’d invented a prison argot.

royal road

If the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to the unconscious, then the interpretation of poems takes the same wondrous road to the unknowable.

stuck here & there

After the critic got finished with the poem it was a pincushion of far-fetched associations.

small window

He talked in those commonplaces of the workshop method, thus you could tell that everything he knew about poetry was learned in the couple of years he’d spent in a MFA program.

working dog

A critic should be a terrier let loose in a thicket of letters.

got it second hand

The way he criticized the poem seemed like received opinion; no original work had been done on the piece.