Equanimity

 
             

   
 
 

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

 
Reading William Logan's All the Rage I noticed what might pass for an apologia pro critica sua:
Most critics love to share an enthusiasm, and I'm no different; but the critic's responsibility, the king's shilling he accepts, is to the reader -- what reader wants the critic to temper his words to the author's feelings?
And here I was thinking criticism was beholden neither to the reader who reads the piece, nor the editor who (coff) pays the critic, nor the publisher who sends the book, but to poetry -- that the critic is responsible to say what (if anything) some new instances of poetry are up to, what the experience of reading the work is like, and whether the poems (as Logan puts it elsewhere) will repay rereading.

If it's too vague to say that we write criticism for the art itself, then ok count me among the writers for the reader.

Jordan - #

 

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I'm Jordan Davis.
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