Quote:
Originally posted by Rose Kelleher:
The thought of any critic wielding any influence at all on the direction of contemporary poetry is something I don't quite understand. What exactly is the direction of contemporary poetry? What does that mean? Does it mean the selection of poetry to be reviewed by prominent critics and included in important anthologies? Does that matter?
This may be getting off-topic, but this thread made me think of that 9th c. Irish poem I linked to in my own thread, and the fact that it's survived as long as it has. It probably wasn't preserved by critics or anthologists, but by people who simply liked it and thought it worth remembering. So what if Vendler thinks Hecht isn't worth bothering with? Somebody ripped the cover off the Book of Kells, but it survived. And nowadays anyone who wants to can back stuff up on CDs and email it to other people who can back it up on CDs. It's the readers who matter, and if the work is good, people will read it. Those who rely on critics to tell them what to read may not read it, but who cares?
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Rose,
Of course I agree with you except, people all over the world, many of them without access to the internet, will read something as important as a Faber Anthology and not meet the work of someone as powerful and moving as Hecht, because of the power of one critic. Some people who would have benefitted and grown from encountering Hecht will not do so. As a child who scrambled for books in a far flung island I know how sad that is.
(Which reminds me that a Hecht anthology I ordered from Amazon a couple of months ago has still not arrived.)
Janet