William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were—they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books.
Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Against Aesthetics
- The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism
- Verse Chronicle: Shock and Awe
- Verse Chronicle: You Betcha!
- The Sovereign Ghost of Wallace Stevens
- Eliot in Ink
- Larkin’s Toads
- Verse Chronicle: From Stinko to Devo
- Verse Chronicle: Trampling Out the Vintage
- Frost’s Notebooks: A Disaster Revisited
- Heaney’s Chain
- Heaney’s Ghosts
- Verse Chronicle: Weird Science
- Verse Chronicle: Blah Blah Blah
- World War II Poetry, Reloaded
- Frank O’Hara’s Shopping Bag
- The Village of Louise Glück
- Verse Chronicle: Civil Wars
- Verse Chronicle: Guys and Dove
- Nobody’s Perfect: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
- Elizabeth Bishop at the New Yorker
- Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp
- A Critic’s Notebook
- A List of Don’ts
- Permissions
- Books Under Review
- Index of Authors Reviewed
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