Appreciation …

… Two Poet-Critics | The Hudson Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We may remember T. S. Eliot saying that a poet’s criticism exists to elucidate the poet’s own taste and ambitions. Certainly this is true of both Clive James (who died last November) and John Burnside (still very much with us).[1] Neither of them wields career-making power; both are masters of appreciation, a quality not so highly valued in the academy. Burnside is a good storyteller, a reader for whom context is everything, James a delectable raconteur whose prose (and verse) delights in antithesis. Both have spent their writing lives immersed in multiple genres, eschewing specialization. They are, first and foremost, writers.