Where have all the critics gone?

In a recent article for the Contemporary Poetry Review, poet-critic David Yezzi laments the unwillingness of contemporary poets to write criticism. He means “criticism” in the strong sense—laying out an aesthetic agenda, and such an agenda's relationship to the creation of standards of taste. His argument is compelling when it points convincingly to those institutional limitations (prizes, jobs, general small-worldishness) which restrict poets’ desire or ability to write criticism which might stir the pot. He is less convincing when suggesting that it’s a critic’s job to “sift with a fine sieve aesthetic material and discard the chaff”—insofar as such a “culture warrior”-style position presupposes a system of valuation which many poets and critics have been working consciously to dismantle, for some time now. Anyway, here’s the gist of the argument:

Today, criticism is out. Blogs and letters columns are in. When a negative review appears, wounded poets fire off blistering e-mails to the offending magazine (it might be this one)—no matter if the wronging critic was right! It’s possible to imagine, in more melancholy moments, that the once-vital culture of literary criticism has devolved from pointed, perspicacious, well-reasoned articles into huffy Letters to the Editor. Whatever the case, “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” (Eliot’s famous phrase) is not an occupation that interests most contemporary poets; essays and reviews no longer figure as part of a poet’s project. If Jarrell envisioned a critical age, ours is an Age of Creative Writing, and creative writing is in many ways allergic to criticism (except occasionally as an agent of career advancement or generic boosterism).

Futhermore, and perhaps most practically, Yezzi argues that critical writing is a necessary component of thinking poetically, and of writing poetry. In this way, it’s in the poet’s best interest to write criticism, because that is where he or she may end up drawing his or her most important conclusions:

The most compelling reason by far for a poet to write criticism is that it is a useful, almost indispensible, adjunct to writing poems. Let’s take as a model Yeats rather than Rimbaud: most poets are not white-hot prodigies but rather slow-burners grappling with their work over decades. Occasionally they grow, as Yeats did, into a late flowering that considerably extends and elevates their achievement. According to this model, a poet’s work is never done, her most important and lasting discoveries always just around the next corner. The process is one of constant weighing and sorting, of risking certain unlikely moves and avoiding others. This ongoing series of choices and discoveries is essentially a critical process.

Speaking of cultural warriors and nostalgia for tough-minded real men, here's Paula Cole singing "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?":