When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.