(New to) Great Regulars: Among poets, the taut ironies

the New Critics valued have been displaced by other values and habits--from the confessional onslaught of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath to the postmodern diffuseness of John Ashbery.

Perhaps that is why an interest in the New Criticism functions, among poets, as a kind of password--a pledge of high ambition, intellectual seriousness, and defiance of trends.

from Adam Kirsch: New York Sun: Harvesting the Waste Land: An Anthology of New Criticism

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