I've already responded at length to this poem, which I admire greatly, so I won't say any more on that. But I do want to second Tim's comments on the possibility--no, probability--of learning from the negative criticism of poets whose work we admire and respect. What it does is to force a reappraisal, an opportunity for justification in one's own mind, for verbal choices that are generally made without calculation. If that reappraisal is done honestly, it can lead to a better understanding of why we do what we do in specific poems, and that's always valuable--if it's done as real discovery and not as a way to respond and refute the critic. At the end of the process of thinking through such criticism, sometimes I've seen how I should have done better, and sometimes I've been reassured that what I did was, for better of worse, what that poem needed from me, despite the disagreement with someone I would have wanted very much to please. In either case, the thought involved has been even more valuable and instructive than painful.
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