Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry

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WILLIAM LOGAN is the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. Intense and savagely witty, he is the most irritating and strong-minded reviewer of contemporary poetry we have. A survey of American, British, and Irish poetry in the eighties and early nineties, Reputations of the Tongue is a book of poetry criticism more honest than any since Jarrell's Poetry and the Age.The book opens with an essay arguing with Eliot over tradition and individual talent, it closes with a close scrutiny of contemporary British and Irish poetry. At the heart of the book are long essays on W.H. Auden, W.D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and Geoffrey Hill -- and the reviews of major and minor contemporary poets that have earned Logan his reputation.Appearing in the New York Times, Washington Post, Poetry, Parnassus, and Sewanee Review, Logan's reviews have been noted for their violence, intelligence, candor, and humor. Many aroused tempers on first publication, leading one Pulitzer Prize winner to offer to run the critic over with a truck. Even as he tackles the radical excess of Ashbery and Ginsberg, however, Logan lauds the rich quietude of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, the froth and verbal fervor of Amy Clampitt, the philosophical comedies of Gjertrud Schnackenberg.Logan, whose own poetry has been called brilliant, formidable, passionate, and difficult, is the latest in a long line of distinguished poet-critics. One hears in his criticism the care for language and meaning, the way a word clatters against another word or seduces it, that animates his poems.The essays in this collection take the long view. Aspiring to more than miscellany or gossip, Reputations of the Tongue is thework of a critic for whom the reviewing of poetry is still a high calling.