POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
A PARTISAN VERDICT
Painters very rarely enter the field of criticism—they are too busy painting. Their selections or rejections are made privately and the result is seen in their canvases. When painters or sculptors have written or talked about their work, in letters or in recorded conversations, they have given us a body of creative criticism far finer than anything the critic, who is not a painter or a sculptor, may undertake to add.
I sometimes wish that poets confined their writing to poetry, that the only criticism indulged in by them was the intimate sort expressed in letters or conversations. Today it is so easy for poets to rush into criticism, and so much of their criticism consists in smashing other people's windows, instead of in making their own windows clear! As I remember the prefaces of the older poets, these were not used as battle grounds, or as totem poles on which were displayed proudly the scalps of neighboring chieftains. Yet it is this purpose which the preface very often serves for the poet today, who can, it seems, establish his own position only by explaining the futility of the work of some brother poet. And this preface then serves as a clew for the reviewer, who prolongs the discussion of irrelevant values, and establishes none—the intrinsic beauty of the poet reviewed often receiving little attention. It is not that one questions the worth of destructive criticism in itself, but that one distrusts and is annoyed by ex cathedra statements not sustained by a critique raisonné of the craft of poetry as such. To cite examples from recent prefaces would only lead us into the pitfalls
[50]
