Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry
William Logan
Abstract
William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the “most hated man in American poetry,” his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. This book takes poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. The book begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. “The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism” is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ball ... More
William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the “most hated man in American poetry,” his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. This book takes poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. The book begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. “The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism” is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, it argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were—they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. The book looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney. The text argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. It revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist.
Keywords:
American poetry,
aesthetics,
poems,
Wallace Stevens,
Frank O'Hara,
Philip Larkin,
T. S. Eliot,
Elizabeth Bishop,
Robert Lowell
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231166867 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231166867.001.0001 |
