Prophets & Professors: Essays on the Lives and Works of Modern Poets

by Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer is the most clear-eyed and fierce literary critic writing today ... and he's troubled about the state of poetry. These 23 essays -- many written for The New Criterion -- take no half-measure and fewer prisoners. The Helen Vendlers and Allen Ginsbergs are radically examined, leaving the world a better place.

Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Theodore Bruce Bawer, who writes under the name Bruce Bawer, is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and novelist and poet who has also written about gay rights, Christianity and Islam.

Bawer's writings on literature, gay issues and Islam have all been highly controversial. While championing such authors as William Keepers Maxwell Jr., Flannery O'Connor, and Guy Davenport, he has criticized such authors as Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow. A member of the New Formalists, a group of poets who promoted the use of traditional forms, he has assailed such poets as Allen Ginsberg for what he views as their lack of polish and technique.

Bawer was one of the first gay activists to seriously propose same-sex marriage, notably in his 1993 book A Place at the Table, and his 2006 book While Europe Slept was one of the first to skeptically examine the rise of Islam in the Western world. Bawer's work is cited positively by Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto.

Although he has frequently been described as a conservative, Bawer has often protested that such labels are misleading or meaningless. He has explained his views as follows: "Read A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus and While Europe Slept and Surrender one after the other and you will see that all four books are motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny."

Reviews

[Jamie Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

High-brow haterism. Bawer seems compelled to diminish the legacies of some of America's most beloved poets (most notably WCW and HD) in favor of the poets he admires (Dickinson, Stevens, Justice etc.). He's mostly dimissive of experimental poetry, though the fact that he aims his sights at the Beats, while avoiding the Black Mountain poets almost entirely, aside from a few marginalizing comments ("the pretentiousness of Olson's organic form" or his indictment of them for the "WCW revivalism"), is somewhat telling. Buried under his affinity for traditional forms is, at least in theory, an admirable poetics. He favors clarity over innovation (he's a substance over style kind of guy), and if his intellectual fervor didn't come across so strongly he would seem wildly outdated. Lucky for him, he comes armed with a razor-sharp wit and a knack for belittlement that is truly entertaining. His essays re: the Beats are hysterically funny, and he writes with such an air of authority that it's difficult to not be persuaded.