[Richard Wakefield]

Many thanks to Alex for entrusting this page to me, and many thanks in advance to all who contribute. A few words about my own philosophy of criticism: My goal is to recommend and to teach. After many years as a critic I'm fortunate in rarely having to review anything I don't like, and generally, I think, people prefer to have something recommended, along with the reasons for the recommendation. I usually try to avoid fighting the culture wars in my reviews -- I see literally a couple of hundred volumes of college workshop free verse in a given year, but I don't choose one to review simply for the opportunity it provides me to attack its ilk and the great cultural decay I might believe they all indicate. John Updike once wrote of his own approach to criticism, "Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban." I keep that posted over my desk, and I seek out the works to which I can submit without feeling sullied or gulled.
However, that's me. You want to dip your pen in acid? Do so.

[Julie]

Hi Richard.

I'm not entirely clear what the forum is for, so I'll ask you here in public in case anyone else is a little unsure.

I recently posted a topic on overused rhymes in general, wanting to discuss how critics often latch on a rhyme pair and label it "overused." I stated how I disagreed with that critique, since I feel all English rhymes are overused, to a greater or lesser extent.

Would that discussion be appropriate for this forum, or do you have a different vision?

Julie

[Richard Wakefield]

Julie, I think the topic of critics' condemnation of "overused rhymes" could work just fine here. I would prefer to pursue it this way: What might such a criticism mean, and is it a useful or even meaningful comment for a critic to make? My preferences aside, unless and until another moderator raises a ruckus with me for infringing on his or her territory I'll be glad to see whatever the users deem fitting.
I would also like to see discussion of such questions as these: To whom do critics ideally address themselves? What are the legitimate purposes of criticism? What critics might we take as good or awful practitioners?
For example, as a critic I generally do not take it as my job to use a work under review as an opportunity to comment on the decline of civilization, or even only of literature. Yet some works do bear scrutiny as part of a trend. When is it legitimate for the critic to enlarge his or her focus beyond the work at hand? How much such scrutiny can an individual work be made to bear?
Tim Murphy suggested that the title here should have been "The Discerning Ear." There's a good critical point right there. I believe poetry is aural and that the good critic conveys part of the auditory experience to his or her reader.
On the other hand, I wanted to allude to Dickinson's "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye / Much sense the starkest madness / 'Tis the majority / In this, as all, prevail..." (notice that my aural memory doesn't retain the idiosyncratic capitalization). Dickinson believed that there are sensibilities that can discern the madness of what the majority calls sense, and vice versa. This, too, can be the critic's task.
Richard

[Alan Sullivan]

Congratulations on the new page, Richard. I suspect some of General Talk is likely to wander over here, which is fine. There's something alarmingly post-modern about criticism of criticism. The worm eats its tail.

A word about Java script. If you use the control above, and type in the passage you want italicized, it will appear at the end of whatever text you have on screen. That's why you wound up with an italicized "ear" after your name. It looked pretty funny.

Alan