: Re: What to look for when criticizing poetry? A recent question got me thinking about how to criticize poetry well and I realized I am not very good at it. I can do themes, and that's about

@Angela458

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A poem [implicitly] defines the criteria of its own success

This is actually largely true of any piece of writing. If you were to measure Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning by the same yardstick, you're not really being reasonable. A piece absurdist Magical Realism about the pointlessness of a particular life, and a holocaust survivor's rumination on finding meaning in spite of incredible suffering and tragedy, are interesting to contrast, but are intended to have quite different effects. The first question in either case is whether they succeeded. By objective measures, both did. Full disclosure: I hate Kafka's writing.

More specifically speaking of poems, you can't really critique a piece of free verse for not observing iambic pentameter. (You might, on the other hand, suggest that a particular long-lined free verse poem just sounds like pretentious sentences, and doesn't really resemble your understanding of poetry.) On the other hand, if something is a Shakespearean sonnet, except for garbled meter in a couple of the lines, then that metrical failure is a failure indeed.

Except in the subset of cases where the poet is carefully and intentionally setting up and then breaking expectations, it is the patterns and conventions established by the poet which should your first yardstick.

So yes, a remark that, for example, "Days" and "Skies" is not an adequate slant rhyme may be a fair criticism... Or it might not, depending on how rigorously the poet tends to rhyme, and how out-of-place the failure is.

This sliding-scale for criticism is especially important in regards to poetry, which can layer in any number of extra dimensions beyond what is usually put forward in prose, from meter and rhymes to specific families of images, or kinds of veiled commentary. Success is success of intention - when intention can be discerned.

There is a [fuzzy] line between quality and taste

In an essay on literary criticism, C.S. Lewis remarked that reviewers must be very careful in talking about a genre or subject they simply don't care for, and maybe should altogether avoid giving criticism on topics outside of their interest. There's a difference between "I don't care for spy thrillers," and "This was a bad spy thriller."

I could not fairly review Kafka; I don't understand how anyone could think anything positive about The Metamorphosis or A Hunger Artist. But there are people who think well of these pieces (at least well enough to assign them as reading in a that lit class I was taking years ago). I know, intellectually, that there must be some kind of dimension that other people experience beyond the vacuity and navel-gazing pointlessness that is all that I can observe in them.

Personally, when there's nothing about the theme that I feel that I can fairly critique, I do my best to focus on technical issues, or on the authorial intention, if I can manage it - but...

Ideally, one could state when differences in taste overwhelm objective measures

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