The Love of Poetry

Ben Lerner's much-bespoken book-length essay, The Hatred of Poetry, is built on a conceptual framework drawn primarily from Plato and one of Lerner's mentors, the late poet Allen Grossman.  Allen Grossman and I, as it happens, attended the same high school in Minnesota (in classes exactly 20 years apart).

Although I admire Grossman's deeply-felt and magisterial writing (he produced a wonderful essay on Hart Crane), I've never taken to his theoretical perspective, his philosophy of poetry.  Nor do I agree with Ben Lerner's recent extrapolation, here, of some of those concepts.

I wrote an piece called "The Love of Poetry" in response.  It's not a review.  I try to mimic Lerner's anecdotal, autobiographical style in order to draw different conclusions.  The essay was published today by the online journal DISPATCHES, and you can find it here.