Like no other period in American history, the twentieth century has produced a great flourishing of critics who not only wrote poetry, but also published criticism dealing directly with the text and aesthetics of poems. Beginning with John Crowe Ransom’s “Wanted: An Ontological Critic” and closing with John Ciardi’s “How Does a Poem Mean?” , R.S. Gwynn has assembled many of the pivotal essays written by these poet-critics over the last fifty years, some long out of print.
From the pens of a dozen authors, such as Robert Penn Warren, Louise Bogan, Allen Tate, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell, the essays were written in an atmosphere of practicality. It was a time when critical readings of poetry elucidated the poem rather than the external ideologies and theories of the critic, when criticism was accessible to the educated, common reader. As Robert Lowell said, “You waited for their essays, and when a good critical essay came out, it had the excitement of a new imaginative work.”
In gathering and making these texts available again in The Advocates of Poetry, Gwynn has restored to us voices that pose a firm resistance to the current critical fragmentation of pure poem.
