NYT Book Review argues for criticsim

The front page (and the middle) of this weekend's New York Times Book Review featured a roundtable of sorts on the current state of literary criticism. Almost everybody seems to think it's in decline, but that it's really important. Poetry magazine contributor Adam Kirsch offered his two cents:

If you are writing poetry, or even fiction, the best response to the “absence of echo” is probably indifference. The echoes that creative work provokes are generally too quiet and internal to be measured by indexes like sales figures. Things are somewhat different for a critic, since the critic is necessarily more conscious than other writers of his own will, of what he wants to happen in the world as a result of his writing. As Kazin puts it, “He writes to convince, to argue, to establish his argument.”