The Hopkins Review

Criticism is messy by nature and messy in fact. The art of poetry is a dirty business. A critic is the construction of his errors, his silliness, his sincerity, his doubt.

—William Logan, "Against Aesthetics"

Over the past few decades William Logan has established himself as the leading critic and reviewer of modern and contemporary poetry. He has done this with a formidable willingness to review and review again the latest slim volumes from American and English poets. His frequent, omnibus poetry chronicles in The New Criterion are such as to make an aspiring young poet, or an established older one, worry that the Logan axe may fall on his or her latest effort. Speaking of Randall Jarrell, to whom he is regularly compared with approval (Logan's first collection of literary essays and reviews was dedicated to Jarrell and R. P. Blackmur), he referred to Jarrell's "genially murderous style." Reviewers of Logan's own books tend to quote instances of a similar style, of which a couple of examples: Billy Collins loves the "cheesy sentiment of the everyday"; he is "the Caspar Milquetoast of contemporary poetry; never a word used in earnest; never [End Page 452] a memorable phrase." On Sharon Olds, for whom Logan has a pensive and especially murderous fondness, returning more than once to review one of her books: "She trades in shameless prose chopped up into lines of poetry, lurid as a tabloid"; her poetry is "vivid as a bullet wound, and written without taste or depth"; "She loves being gruesome under the guise of being human," and her poems are "as erotic as a greasy sock." He has a good word for the critic Helen Vendler, calling her book on Shakespeare's sonnets "a masterpiece of reader's attention," but finds in a sentence from another of her books "unnecessary exaggeration," "leaden repetition," and "rhetoric gone wild with self-esteem." As a rule, any compliment to a poet or a reviewer or a critic is favored with some less tasty additive.

However inescapable the comparison of Logan to Jarrell may be, there is a significant difference in how Logan has dealt with poetry over the 25 or so years that he has been actively writing about it. Jarrell wrote his brief, if genially murderous reviews of other poets early in his career—they would be gathered together only posthumously. His finest book, Poetry and the Age, has only a single omnibus verse chronicle, containing mainly sympathetic, not-at-all murderous treatments of the poets gathered. What we remember about Poetry and the Age are its two essays on Frost, along with admiring accounts of Whitman, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and appreciations of emerging talents like Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. So the main force of Jarrell's writings about poetry is encomiastic. By contrast, Logan has followed his first, relatively short book of poetry commentary with five substantial volumes—each in the 300-page range—that contain all the verse chronicles he has been turning out since the century began. As with his return visits to Sharon Olds, contemporaries keep popping up for Logan to have a further crack at; not all the commentary is negative, but since a lot of it is strongly on the dismissive side it's not clear just how much attention posterity will pay to these reviews, even when as often they are right on. Where Logan shines even more than his predecessor Jarrell is in the substantial essays on modern poets. Among those are Housman, Frost, Pound, Stevens, Hart Crane, Auden, Moore, Lowell, Bishop, and Geoffrey Hill. Many of them are outstanding examples of permanently valuable criticism. To single out just two, the appearance of Lowell's Collected Poems prompted a 41-page survey of the poet's work from Lord Weary's Castle to Day by Day ("The World Out-Herods Herod"). I know of no essay on the poet...