The New Criterion
It operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism
- The Wall Street Journal
FeaturesApril 2012 The unbearable rightness of criticism On negative reviews of great poets. When critics play parlor games, they imagine how they would have reviewed the controversial books of the past. Critics are later judged, not by the book they failed to pan, but by the book they failed to praise. Most are certain that, given the chance, they would have recognized the genius of Lyrical Ballads, or Leaves of Grass, or The Waste Land. We pour bile on the heads of the dolts of 1798 and 1855 and 1922 who didn’t realize what was on the desk before them. When you look at those wrongheaded, purblind reviews now long forgotten, however, it’s surprising how shrewd they are, even the most notorious ones. The critics (like the poets themselves) were creatures of their day, and subject to the prejudices of the day. The reviewer is most vulnerable facing a poetry that threatens convention—violations of form and formality tend to provoke the most ill-considered judgments. Yet even there, after ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 30 April 2012, on page 21 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-unbearable-rightness-of-criticism-7331
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Donald Justice interprets Henry James's time on the West Coast. On Antigonick (Sophokles), by Anne Carson, Nice Weather, by Frederick Seidel, PLACE, by Jorie Graham, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, by D. A. Powell, Thrall, by Natasha Trethewey, and Song & Error, by Averill Curdy. On Almost Invisible by Mark Strand, Odi Barbare by Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Thomas Karshan, and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove. The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
Webcasts
Poet George Green reads from his award-winning Lord Byron's Foot
Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012
James Panero on price gouging at the Met, with Fred Dicker Weblog 
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