Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue

by William Logan

The most notorious poet-critic of his generation, William Logan has defined our view of poets good and bad, interesting and banal, for more than three decades. Featured in the New York Times Book Review , the Times Literary Supplement , and the New Criterion , among other journals, Logan's eloquent, passionate prose never fails to provoke readers and poets, reminding us of the value and vitality of the critic's savage art.

Like The Undiscovered Poetry in the Age of Tin , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Our Savage Art features the corrosive wit and darkly discriminating critiques that have become the trademarks of Logan's style. Opening with a defense of the critical eye, this collection features essays on Robert Lowell's correspondence, Elizabeth Bishop's unfinished poems, the inflated reputation of Hart Crane, the loss of the New Critics, and a damning-and already highly controversial-indictment of an edition of Robert Frost's notebooks.

Logan also includes essays on Derek Walcott and Geoffrey Hill, two crucial figures in the divided world of contemporary poetry, and an attempt to rescue the reputation of the nineteenth-century poet John Townsend Trowbridge. Short reviews consider John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, and dozens of others. Though he might be called a cobra with manners, Logan is a fervent advocate for poetry, and Our Savage Art continues to raise the standard of what the critic can do.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Literary Criticism

368 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2009

About the author

William Logan is Alumni/ae Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of seven books of criticism, most recently Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (Columbia, 2018), and eleven books of poetry. Logan has won the inaugural Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the Allen Tate Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Reviews

[Ernie · Rating 2 out of 5]

He only likes his own and one other living person's poetry.

[Ted Burke · Rating 2 out of 5]

William Logan has become more famous as a disgruntled critic and trench-level wit than as a poet, his nominal calling, and it seems fated that the good writer will be recalled who has dismissed so many for no reason other than an excuse to ladle out more of his cold, lumpy gruel.Even in those instances where one is inclined to agree with him on principle there remains the scraping sound of a blade being sharpened in the background--in his estimations of Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Robert Frost, all one need do is read on with half an eyelid open , allowing the reviewer to present his good, balanced graces and equivocations until he lands upon the puffed-up sins he wishes to expose and the poems he desires to slice and dice. It's a chronic malignity that suggests more symptom than judgement, an indication of someone who makes a harsher case than is required so much of the time.

An honest criticism is appreciated, always, but the negative is the only coin Logan chooses to spend which, I think, renders his judgements suspect , no less than a publicist's hand out. Does Logan desire to be Poetry's Simon Cowell? Doubtless, since there is a kick indeed in handing out bad notices. In Logan's career, however, it ceases to be a form of Truth Telling than an expression of a mind that cannot adjust it's comprehending filters long enough to dare a fresh insight, an idea that might surprise the reader. We have instead a wind up monkey, clashing it's cymbals intensely until someone winds it up again.

[Jon]

William Logan has published several poetry collections, but is perhaps best known for being the Don Rickles of American poetry criticism, lambasting poets he doesn't like. But while it's entertaining--up to a point--to read his demolishings of Tess Gallagher, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins and other contemporaries, I find his longer essays--analyses of earlier poets such as Auden, Frost, Lowell, and Bishop--far more useful and interesting. As a critic Logan is a devotee of the cooked over the raw, the palefaces not the redskins--he doesn't think much of the Beats, the New York School (except some of Ashbery's work), the Black Mountain brigade, most Harlem Renaissance/Black Arts poetry, or (pseudo?) tough guys Alan Dugan and Charles Bukowski (though Logan's opinion of Hilda Doolittle is very similar to Bukowski's, as expressed in the latter's poem "vegas"). OUR SAVAGE ART is a typical collection of Logan's reviews and essays and includes an insightful piece about the different ways Florida, the state where Logan lives, has been portrayed by poets, as well as an interview in which this classicist reveals that he began his writing career as...a rock critic! The irony of it all....