I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
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.
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.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories