I don't see how you can knock it if you haven't tried it. And as for poets who have written criticism, here's a short list:
Plato
Horace
Sidney
Pope n' Johnson
Wordsworth
Shelley
Coleridge
Keats (in letters)
Whitman
Dickinson (in letters)
Browning, Mr.
Arnold
Longfellow
Frost
Pound
Eliot
Stevens
Moore
Williams
Hart Crane
Robinson Jeffers
Olson
Creeley
Duncan
Snyder
Anne Waldman
Donald Hall
Don Justice
Tony Hecht
Dick Wilbur
Annie Finch
Dana Gioia
William Logan
Anne Stevenson (not fretting about chronology now)
Mary Kinzie
Emily Grosholz
John Haines
Ted Kooser
and on and on--hasn't done those folks a bit of harm....
Seriously, though, one can't be writing one's best poetry all the time. The muse has other minds to visit, I guess. In those down times we might as well keep something else going: light verse, translation, prose, etc. And some of that work even turns out to be useful.
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