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Unread 01-16-2002, 03:51 AM
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Tim Love Tim Love is offline
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Location: Cambridge, UK
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[a spin-off from Metrical Poetry:My Secret Kept Alive]

Porridgeface - I can't appreciate what I don't at all understand

Carol Taylor - If a critic says, "I don't understand this but I don't need to understand it to like it," then I know that that critic and I have opposite definitions of poetry

I wonder how others feel about this issue? When reading recently about William Empson (Lowell thought him "the most intelligent poet writing in our language and perhaps the best") I was impressed by how a formidable close-reading theorist like him was happy to say that he loved some Dylan Thomas pieces, but didn't have much of a clue why.

Sometimes I meet poems which don't fit in with my idea of what a good poem should be, but I like them nonetheless. It's a funny world ...
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