Oops - I meant to send a PM and somehow posted it publicly.
As long as I'm here, what the heck. I was writing to Bill Lantry to tell him how much I liked his post. I also mentioned that I'd made an observation vaguely similar to Norman's "That said" bit on page 2 of my little essay in SCR 12, "On Poetry and Perversion":
"Not because they’re puritanical, mind you — they’re
oh so emphatic about that..."
http://shitcreek.auszine.com/issue12...nd-perversion/
In other words, Norman and I observed something similar. I see a critic defensively denying that he's puritanical, and I think, "He protests too much; he has a problem, and can't give the poem a fair reading." Norman sees the same thing and thinks the critic is being needlessly apologetic about his attitude. Either way the critic is being less than honest.