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In the previous installment of this essay, I gave a brief intro to the unreadable in poetry and why we might learn to love it. I focused especially on unreadable poetry’s life...

It’s easy to get lost in debates around form and content, or form and function, or form and freedom, or form and fill-in-the-blank—arguments for the importance of one side over...

चीन ओ अरब हमारा, हिन्दोस्ताँ हमारा रहने को घर नहीं है, सारा जहाँ हमारा खोली भी छिन गयी है, बैंचें भी छिन गयी हैं सड़कों पे घूमता है, अब कारवां हमारा Chin-o-Arab hamara, Hindustan...

To call a literary work “unreadable” is to make a rather flexible aesthetic judgment. Most commonly, one means they didn’t like that work, found it too boring, too gruesome, badly...

Editor's Note: This is the third installment in a three-part essay. To read the first two installments visit these links: Part I and Part II. The ice caps are melting: criticism has failed....

Part of the appeal of poetry as criticism, which I discussed in my last post, is the idea of a poem that can explain itself, with no intervention needed from...

Then, again, one day, the one who was once young will learn that somewhere at the other end of this very earth the older one has died. At first she...

Editor's Note: This is the second installment in a three-part essay. To read the first installment visit this link. Here’s a distinction I try to honor: criticism may sometimes have a professional...

For any writer, the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge brings moments of painful recognition at every turn. Richard Holmes’s magisterial biography of Coleridge is replete with examples of the Romantic...

In Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, critic Terry Eagleton declares: “A critique must establish a certain distance from its object in order to appraise it.”...