criticism for criticism's sake

In its effort to keep pace with the imaginative writers, much of the most intelligent criticism of our time has become ‘Criticism for Criticism’s sake,’ as D.J. Enright has called it. Although, as long ago as 1924, Edwin Muir wrote that ‘all criticism is criticism for criticism’s sake,’ his observation does not contradict Enright’s; for Muir continued: ‘It is a moral habit carried over into art.’ Instead of mediating between the work of art and a nonspecialist public, it has become as specialized and as difficult as modern poetry is reputed to be; more difficult often, because poetry has its own way of communicating complex perceptions, and because critics have added their own complexities to those of their texts.

—Michael Hamburger, “Puerile Utopia and Brutal Mirage,” The Truth of Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry for Baudelaire to Nineteen-sixties (Harcourt, Brace, 1970)

nice nice

No one seems to want to call out a bad poem.

captains courageous

The courage of good criticism.

no tail no donkey

…one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write—a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems—people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets—it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

—Randall Jarrell, from the brief essay “Bad Poets” (1953)

review work

It’s harder to review a book of poems than to write one.

art and anarchy

...art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province of art. What was missing here, was something anarchistic in the air. I must modify that statement about art and anarchy. Art is only anarchy in juxtaposition with organized society. It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society apparently must be based. It is a benevolent anarchy: it must be that and if it is true art, it is. It is benevolent in the sense of constructing something which is missing, and what it constructs may be merely criticism of things as they exist.

—Tennessee Williams, “Something Wild,” Where I Live: Selected Essays (New Directions, 1978), edited by Christine B. Day and Bob Woods

bored through

I was bored by your poem…no, what I mean to say, is that your poem bored through me.

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.

empty chair

Sitting there in workshop she was like an empty chair—it was clear the moment she spoke how little poetry and criticism she’d read.

scholarship or sensibility

Distinguishing between a criticism based on scholarship or one relying on sensibility.

one and many

In order to say something insightful about any one poem, you need to have read enough others.

introduce and give insight

Critics can introduce us to poems we may have overlooked and they can give us insights into those we’ve read but have only dimly entered the mind's aperture.

close reading

Close reading: Trying to be in the room where the poem happened.

no kink

I hung about town the whole month of June because of the introduction I was writing to my Shakespeare translations. I was terribly afraid to get stuck in the muddle of pseudo-scholarly verbosity which every great centuries-old theme gathers round it and of only adding to this tangled skein a kind of modified kink. Imagine, it did not happen! I succeeded in saying in very simple and comprehensible words a great deal about Shakespeare that I learned when I was translating him, and all this on one printer’s sheet!

—Boris Pasternak, in a letter to S. I Chikovani, 15 March 1946
Letters to Georgian Friends, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seckler & Warburg, 1967)

feeling it

Critic, never be too smart to feel.

time spent

On the side of critics, often good criticism takes much longer than the original composition.

selection is criticism

Even organizing a reading series is a critical act.

but what about

Remember, there is always a counter to whatever smart thing you can say about poetry.

brain drain

After the Enlightenment the exegetes fled from the Bible to literature; hence we have scholarly critics.

first rule of criticism

A critic must not corrupt the text with invented material.