One of the things that chiefly distinguishes William Logan’s thinking about poetry from that of other critics is the reasonable separation he grants between the poet and the poem. That is to say, Logan reads poetry neither as if it were a mirror of the poet’s soul, nor does he read it, as post-structuralist theory demands, as mere “text,” as a depersonalized artifact composed from all other poetic texts.

In Reputations of the Tongue, his second collection of essays and reviews, Logan opens with a discussion of T. S. Eliot’s classic 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” He lays out the points at which his thinking diverges from Eliot’s, specifically regarding Eliot’s ideas about “impersonality.” Eliot believed that individual personality was often an impediment to genuine poetic expression. Consequently he suggested that the poet should seek the “extinction” of personality in order that the mind might function as a medium for the conveyance of impersonal poetic emotion, a neutral receptacle for “seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” Many critics have felt that an eerie passivity marks Eliot’s theory of poetic creation (though Eliot did famously note that “of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things”). Logan promulgates a more active role for the poet. In “The Condition of the Individual Talent” he writes that “No poet succeeds without holding his personality in something like contempt. This doesn’t mean the writer’s highest state of development would be without personality at all.” Logan neither extols the self nor expects it, as Eliot wished, to retire into the role of “catalyst.” The word “contempt,” however, suggests the degree to which Logan remains close to Eliot. His impatience with much contemporary verse is generally a reflection of an Eliot-like impatience with the merely personal.

In his essay “Beyond Psychology (Elizabeth Bishop),” Logan praises Bishop’s poetry for its forays beyond the self, but faults two studies of the work essentially because their writers, Lorrie Goldensohn (Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poet) and Bonnie Costello (Questions of Mastery), try to force meaning at the expense of subtlety. Goldensohn misreads the imagery in “Going to the Bakery,” referring to the poem as one “where neither the foreign American resident nor the home government nor the helpless population is denied corrupt or unpleasant roles.” Logan notes that Bishop’s poem, with its closely observed and finely rendered detail, is too rich and nuanced to be reduced to “blatant politics.” Both Goldensohn and Costello (though Logan feels the latter has read Bishop from a richer base), squander attention searching for one-to-one correspondences between the work and Bishop’s life or surroundings, a pursuit destined to fail because great poetry “requires a transfiguration that removes it from simple analysis.” Insisting on Bishop’s subversiveness, Costello tries to remake the poet in her own image, losing “Bishop’s messiness and scumbling, her delicacy, her emotional frailty, even her whimsicality.”

Logan’s sense of the separation between the poet and her words allows language a certain autonomy. Meaning can occur because of the pressure between the words themselves. While the poet composes the work, the result may not solely reflect what she has seen, thought, or felt:

Every poem of value must have a residue. A residue is not a mystery or a withholding. It is a result of the continual ignition in the language, a combustion in the nearness of words… . In a minor poem the residue is small and easily exhausted but in the greatest it suffers a constant renewal.

His insight about linguistic residue guides Logan’s judgments, and his readings of individual poems reflect a fine grasp of their distinct compositions. Logan’s criticism also exhibits a knack for epigrammatic concision. In “Millions of Strange Shadows (James Merrill),” he writes that the short poems “have an elegance of surface that cannot conceal the brooding shapes within,” and that “Merrill is not a serious poet whose wit defeats him; he moves toward seriousness only through his wit.” Similarly, in “In and Out of the Avant,” Logan faults Ginsberg, particularly in his late poems, for creating too little residue, relying instead on a “bald philosophizing” that permits no richness of meaning. While Logan appreciates Ashbery’s gift for “a vague suggestiveness that is also a brilliant suggestiveness,” he wryly notes that “a poet can live on the banality of ideas far longer than he can live on the banality of expression.”

Contrary to fashion, Logan affirms qualities in poetry that other critics have neglected or summarily dismissed. In these plain-spoken days, artifice has fallen into disrepute, a situation that doesn’t prevent Logan from writing with appreciation in “The Habits of Their Habitats” (Clampitt and Schnackenberg) about Amy Clampitt’s pleasure in “pure ornamentation.” A poet of place, Clampitt has also commanded Logan’s respect for her own respectful relation to her surroundings: “Wherever she is, she takes possession, not by imposing onto the landscape the template of her own sensibility (as happens with poets of stronger temperaments like Auden, or more lurid ones like Lowell), but by engaging the intimacies within each horizon as if they were her own.” Occasionally, Logan’s efforts at concision backfire, as when he writes of Clampitt that “the most severe of her texts rely on their exchanges, not their emotions, and such poems are the terrain of their transition.” But such clotted diction is the exception, and most readers will find Logan’s commentary lucid and rewarding.

Logan gives to his critical assessments the same breadth and intensity of attention that he asks of poets, though in his shorter pieces he necessarily relies on summary. In “Chronicle of the Late Eighties,” an overview devoting three or four paragraphs to each of the selected poets, he conveys his range of concerns, from subject and tone to meter and rhyme. Take, for example, what he has to say about Lucie Brock-Broido:

Her attention to the headlines cannot wholly corrupt her verve and occasional humor (“Dogs bark because they always do in pastorals”). She seems to know what she’s doing even when it’s not worth doing well.

His less damning attention can be equally effective. About James Lasdun’s work, Logan writes that it “shows that the effervescent shallowness of our culture can still be troubled by the careful shudder of meter or the possession of rhyme.”

Logan’s longer essays, such as “The Midnight of Nostalgia (Donald Justice),” “The Charity of the Mystery of Geoffrey Hill,” and “The Absolute Unreasonableness of Geoffrey Hill,” show his particular affinity for the temper and sensibility of those poets. In his essay on Justice, for example, Logan takes the opportunity to look at the function of nostalgia in poetry. Pointing out that the first use in English of the Greek neologism (“nostos, a return home, and algos, pain”) dates only as far back as the eighteenth century, he grants that the notion itself has tended to remain “within the pathology of homesickness.” Logan also makes an important distinction about this impulse: “But nostalgia isn’t necessarily a wish to return to the past; it is the wish to be privileged to recall it… . Nostalgia is the refuge of poets for whom the current modes of reminiscence have been irremediably stained with sentiment.” Poems reflecting an over-involvement with personal history, replete with mundane detail, represent the antithesis of Logan’s interest in nostalgia. Rather, Logan’s interest has to do with nostalgia’s function as “anti-sentiment, as the canker within sentiment.” Pointing out that Justice rarely uses the self to locate his dramas, Logan admires the poet’s modernist detachment in which he makes undefensive use of the past as a source of “recovered plentitude.” In The Sunset Maker (1987), Justice draws on history, not parasitically for its emotional value, but rather as way of enacting responsibility through the “measurement of loss.” In fact, Logan points out, one of the strengths of Justice’s poetry arises not from its withholding of emotion, but from its “withholding of confidence from emotion.”

Just as Logan’s allergy to over-confidence informs his readings, so his appreciation of reticence leads him to admire Geoffrey Hill’s The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy, a long poem faulted by several critics for misplaced nostalgia and defense of an indefensible past. But Logan points out that Hill’s charity lies in his ability to consider the difficult case, that of Charles Peguy, a French poet who was killed early in World War I, and “not flinch from its ambiguous reach or its own ambivalent response.” This willingness to face the ambiguity of the past, to scrutinize it within a framework of skepticism, is precisely what keeps nostalgia from serving merely sentimental purposes, from being overly confident of its feelings: “The inadequacy of contemporary poetry may lie in its confidence of feeling … and its absence of a knowledge susceptible to anything outside feeling.” Yet even here Logan follows no party line. In “Natural Selections (W. D. Snodgrass),” he lists Heart’s Needle (1959), Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965) as three of the “half dozen distinguished books of the period,” discussing the accomplishments of “that school so condescendingly called confessional.” For Logan, each poet, each poem present a separate case, one that he judges without theory, dogma, or unnecessary recourse to the personal life, but rather by gauging the effect of the words on the page.