Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry

by William Logan

William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were―they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books.

Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved.

Genres: Poetry

344 pages, Hardcover

First published April 8, 2013

About the author

William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Reviews

[Lew Watts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Logan is Logan, and this collection of essays and critiques doesn't disappoint. One can only imagine a poet's terror on learning that Mr Logan has decided to review his or her latest collection. Some reviews, obviously, are ecstatically positive, but it's the sight of blood that draws many readers and for which Logan is famous. In one chapter entitled "Verse Chronicle: Blah Blah Blah," Richard Wilbur, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Philips, Rae Armantrout, Les Murray, and Geoffrey Hill are given the treatment, and Logan's takedown of Robert Faggen (the editor of Frost's "Notebooks") is monumental and merciless.
I had read some of the reviews before, but many were new to me. A long-time fan of Louise Gluck's early work, with its bare minimalism, I looked forward to reading the chapter "The Village of Louise Gluck," that centers on Gluck's 2009 collection, "A Village Life" (which I disliked). As Logan points out, this collection is "a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say." At the time, Logan believed that Gluck was "perhaps the most popular literary poet in America," which makes the level of his criticism of "A Village Life" pretty remarkable—"The lines are long, the poems sputtering on, sometimes for pages, until they run out of gas, as if they were the first drafts of a torpid afternoon." Ouch...but I couldn't agree more.

[Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acerbic and witty, Logan can’t resist the chance to dunk on his contemporaries. If your desk was stacked and restacked to the ceiling with nervous first books of poetry, I suppose you wouldn’t pass up on the chance to become a cruel arbiter of taste, either. The problem is that this leaves the reader with the burning question of whether Logan even enjoys reading poetry anymore at all? If the answer is no, which it very well may be, magazines and journals should no longer look to him as such a trusted quality assurant. The long closing essay on Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp is a great work of both research and writing, which is all that criticism can hope to achieve in the shadow of the art itself.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Logan has done us a favor with "Guilty Knowledge..." by exposing inferior poets, most of them "modern". His reviews are brashly honest.

Minor poets like myself have wondered for years how our contemporaries could write and get away with such glibness, self-adoration, whingeing, vagueness, and smugness, among a host of other sins of self-indulgence.

Professor Logan gives these mountebanks the stink-eye they deserve and trashes almost all of them. Definitely a good read for those beginning writers still hanging around out there and trying their creative best not to sink into mediocrity.

[Mills College Library]

811.509 L8319g 2014

[Edward Ferrari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Logan is Logan. He enjoys himself and it comes across. Enjoyed the pieces on Bishop the most.