The Perfect Moods of William Logan

William Logan is not the only writer to breed dogs in order to keep cats. Robert Graves, who liked that phrase, did it all the time, tirelessly whelping popular prose works such as I, Claudius and The Greek Myths to support his long Kattenstoet of slim—and not so slim—poetry books. If only T. S. Eliot, in his lifetime, had kept Cats; the Lloyd Webber musical would have succeeded resoundingly where Pound’s Belle Esprit failed in easing Old Possum’s financial worries. (The late Valerie Eliot did keep Cats and on a very short leash, as it turns out, Grizabella, Rum Tum Tugger, et alia managing to get their paws on an estimated $100 million dollars for the poet’s estate—nothing to grouse about, even if you are offered pheasant.) Eliot’s greatest success in the West End, it turns out, came when he wasn’t even trying. No doubt James Fenton has mused on this fact, as the gross for Les Mis (of which he retains a percentage) surpasses $3 billion worldwide for the stage show alone. These are heady numbers—and not just for poets.

When Eliot wrote prose for money, it was generally book reviews and lectures, the same for Auden and a long list of poet-critics including Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, and Louise Bogan. Given how little money there is in reviewing (don’t ever break it down to an hourly rate!), it’s sweetly sad that poets compose reviews just for the dough, though Dr. Johnson was right that without the cash, writing is strictly for blockheads. Logan began work as a critic in his late teens, covering records for a “grimy now forgotten rock magazine,” led on, he confesses, by “little except passion and an ornery nature.” After landing as a poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he turned his critical toolkit to book reviewing and began contributing to the Chicago Tribune. Today he is one of the most accomplished poetry critics of his generation, and a mainstay of the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Quarterly Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and an array of other outlets including the Sewanee Review, as well as the New Criterion, where his twice-yearly verse chronicle raises hackles and hosannas in equal measure.

Logan’s appearing in the New Criterion has a splendid rightness to it; his essays and reviews vibrate sympathetically with the criticism of the Criterion’s founder, Hilton Kramer (to say nothing of the original Criterion’s editor, T. S. Eliot). “The most hated man in American poetry”: Logan liked Robert McDowell’s tagline for him so well he included it as a blurb on his book Night Battle (1999). Kramer, who died at eighty-four in the spring of 2012, had a comparable talent for infuriating the talentless. (Woody Allen once asked Kramer if he was ever embarrassed to run into artists whom he’d criticized. Without missing a beat, Kramer said “No, I expect them to be embarrassed for doing bad work.”) A notorious scourge of the trendy and the over-puffed, Logan, like Kramer, is universally read and even relished—often, one imagines, secretly by flashlight. Kramer used to like to quote William Dean Howells, who said “the problem for a critic is not making enemies but keeping them.”

Despite their generation gap, the two men share an admiration for modernism and the New Criticism, as well as a deep distaste for academic literary theory. Logan is what one rock-star academic of my acquaintance refers to mockingly as “one of the beauty people”—i.e., one of those benighted souls who still derives aesthetic pleasure from works of art. The New Criticism, Logan writes, “takes as its task to understand how meaning and feeling are invented in language (theory flinches as much from the neural itch of feeling as from aesthetics) and to judge if some poems are better than others—not simply better at kowtowing to the mores and manners of our day, but better in aesthetic terms.” Or, as Eliot put it: the critic’s job is “the elucidation...