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Critical Poetry
I often say to young writers &
speakers, that their best masters are their faultfinding brothers & sisters at
home, who will not spare them, but be sure to
pick & cavil, & tell the odious truth. It is smooth mediocrity, weary
elegance, surface finish of our voluminous stock-writers, or respectable
artists, which easy times & a dull public call out, without any salient genius,
with an indigence of all grand design, of all direct power. A hundred statesmen,
historians, painters, & small poets, are thus made: but Burns, & Carlyle, &
Bettine, and Michel Angelo, & Thoreau were pupils in a rougher school.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
N.B.: Naming names has clearly become taboo in
the poetry milieu. Yet naming names is an excellent form of accountability
and the milieu (academics, etc.) seems to relish in its absence of
accountability. Almost never does the editor receive submissions that name names
(poets are great self-censors). For one such submission, see the poems
below by David Ochs, Lord
Byron, Alexander Pope, Osip Mandelstam, and François Villon.
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Critical Poetry from Dead Poets
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Critical Poetry from The American
Dissident
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The American Dissident
www.theamericandissident.org,
a 501c3 nonprofit.
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