Dan Chiasson responds:

Does Jonathan Blake really think that a fine poem could celebrate “our capability for joy” despite others’ suffering? What a mean little idea! To my mind, Gilbert’s gravity stems from acknowledgment of, in Eliot’s words, a “thing ill done and done to others’ harm.” I wasn’t being “sarcastic” when I praised Gilbert’s provocative adjacencies: it’s a great pleasure to read poems so unsparing in their remorse. My review was mostly positive, though Gilbert’s fans apparently expect hagiography.

I was happy to provide Todd Hearon with a chance to display his erudition, though actually it was Keats I quoted in my review, not Yeats. I mean no offense to Anacreon (or Hermes or the tortoise who gave his life for the lyre) by suggesting that the word “musical” does not conjure the deep analogies between poetry and music described by Hearon (nor did I mean to dismiss those analogies). “Musical” means a poem with a lot of mellifluous effects, probably one in regular meter, probably pentameter. I wish I didn’t connect that kind of contemporary writing with intellectual murkiness, bombast, pomposity, sentimentality, etc.; but Walcott’s example, among several others, makes it hard not to do so.