Adam Kirsch responds:
Garrett Doherty raises the difficult question of just how criticism affects the writing of poetry. Certainly poets do not sit down to write with the intention of proving a theory. But the history of poetry shows that thinking about a style can indeed help to make a style—witness the French and Frenchinfluenced criticism that shaped English Augustan poetry, or the obvious effect of Eliot and the New Critics on American poetry in the forties and fifties. By creating a climate of opinion and a scale of values, criticism can and should contribute to the health of poetry. That the values of modernism continue to inform our poetry, and not always for the better, is amply demonstrated by Dan Chiasson's assumption that poets today must be as concerned with being modern as a bicyclist is with handlebars—a notion that would have made no sense to poets before the twentieth century.
Garrett Doherty raises the difficult question of just how criticism affects the writing of poetry. Certainly poets do not sit down to write with the intention of proving a theory. But the history of poetry shows that thinking about a style can indeed help to make a style—witness the French and Frenchinfluenced criticism that shaped English Augustan poetry, or the obvious effect of Eliot and the New Critics on American poetry in the forties and fifties. By creating a climate of opinion and a scale of values, criticism can and should contribute to the health of poetry. That the values of modernism continue to inform our poetry, and not always for the better, is amply demonstrated by Dan Chiasson's assumption that poets today must be as concerned with being modern as a bicyclist is with handlebars—a notion that would have made no sense to poets before the twentieth century.
Originally Published: October 30, 2005
The Poetry Magazine Podcast: No Me, No You, No Opinions
Adam Kirsch Responds