The NY Times has run an excellent article on greatness in poetry. It's always interesting to read NY Times on poetry -- there was a fascinating one about Jorie Graham's entrance to Harvard (Valhalla?) -- because NY Times believes in poetry, but is egoistic enough to be upset when it's confronted with something it doesn't understand. That's a very useful quality, because it respectfully/hesitantly calls a pear a pear, instead of some helium-filled blather. Maybe because of it, the article anointed only one great post-Eliot poet: Elizabeth Bishop. I'm pleased and agree. (There was some noise about Ashbery, but we'll see what happens 20 years after he's dead, which means in roughly 10 years. I mean, 21.) The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work ...
I must finish Words in Air, such a great book...
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