"what is the purpose of criticism?"

In the room the women come and go
talking of Michelangelo

is such a great line. Don't hate on famed racist ts eliot. Well, go ahead, you'll feel better.

I love the opening imagery of the fog as a cat, in Prufrock. And his book (illustrated by Gorey) about cats, though I can't remember the name, now.

Didn't know about the racism or the crit.

[...]

"There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything. And, whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are as silent as statues. Poetry is a disinterested use of words: it does not address a reader directly. When it does so, we usually feel that the poet has some distrust in the capacity of the readers and critics to interpret his meaning without assistance, and has therefore dropped into the sub-poetic level of metrical talk ("verse" or "doggerel") which anybody can learn to produce.... The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with."

- Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, "Polemical Introduction"

*lightbulbs appear over both cavemen's heads*

(also one or both of them might have been women)

I would link it but you'll have to find a copy in a bin somewhere as I'm not paying £39.99 for the privilege of accessing Times Online - it's like going into the newsagent and being forced to take out a year's subscription before you can buy the bloody paper.

This sounds like it should be a comedy festival. Not a very good one, though.

I like this answer.

I could talk about this endlessly, but it's too big a subject to take on in a general way.

(I'd mention having been an award-winning critic - but it's not so much a big fish in a small pond scenario as a minnow in a puddle: British comics fandom! I do think I contributed towards upping the standards of criticism in that most underdeveloped of areas (as an editor as well as by writing crit), and I think that is something worthwhile.)

Do you ever meet an ADULT? isn't it time you began to consult one of that exotic genus / Very few specimens in this damnisphere but still not wholly extinct. Not that YOU ever revealed the presence of one TO me.
.....

The lot of you from Eliot
down
appear to suffer from mental paralysis.

(more evidence for ezra pound as proto-vampire-mark-s : "Eliot's low saurian vitality"!!)

"'Only emotion endures.' Surely it is better for me to name over the few beautiful [things] that still ring in my head than for me to search my flat for . . ."
&
"These things have worn smooth in my head and I am not through with them, nor with [x]'s '[a]' nor his other poems in '[b]', though people have told me their flaws. It may be that their content is too much embedded in me for me to look back at the words.

I am almost a different person when I come to take up the argument for [y]'s poems."

Fuck Bush
Fuck War
Fuck You

isn't that the essence of punctum?