Roger: You make a good argument for honest bias, or frank subjectivity, perhaps. That always risks having the review be more about the reviewer than about the reviewed, but with balance it can not only work but be more entertaining to read as well. And with time we get to know a critic and find that she or he does us a service even when our own taste is very different. Still, I like to be surprised by a critic whose work I thought I knew, just as I like to be surprised by a poet I thought I knew.
Bear: There's another possibility, and that is that good poets, good artists of any kind, teach us to read them. Read a few Dickinson poems and they don't get easier, exactly (in fact if anything they get harder, in some ways), but what seemed at first like infelicities become expressive. I remember hearing an interview with a musicologist in which he was asked which of the Beethoven symphonies caused the most consternation at its premier. I'd have thought it would be the nineth, maybe the fifth, but he said it was the first because no one knew how to listen to it. But learning to listen to a poet requires that we be receptive to being educated, and that means, I believe, approaching the work with openness, maybe with the courage to risk being taken in by trash.
Richard
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