Having spent over 25 years studying, reading and reviewing poetry, I’ve come to the possibly heretical conclusion that it’s often the reviewer, not the poet, who creates the poem. That is, what we think of as a “great” poem (timeless, resonant, artful) is very often not born great. It’s made great. Not by revision, or hidden “genius”, but by the critic, the reader and the commentator, who view it through the right lens at the right time. Put bluntly: a poem is only as good as the reading it receives.
We tend to regard poems as self-contained artefacts, either well-made or not. But poems are not static artefacts. They are more like catalysts: incomplete until acted upon by a mind. And the mind that matters most, is often not the one that wrote the poem but the one that explains it.
Critics don’t merely assess poems, they construct the scaffolding through which we view them. They decide which ambiguities are “interesting”, which facets are “meaningful” and which prosaic lines are secretly fascinating. And over time, their interpretations become part of the poem’s DNA. The original poet might not acknowledge this, but that doesn’t matter. The poem’s real life begins after it has been written.
Many of the so-called classics of poetry began as publishing failures. Some were dismissed entirely, and others were ignored until a prescient critic found something interesting to say about them. Then all of a sudden, that poetry is rebranded as a work of misunderstood genius. This is because the reviewer “created” a poem where there was once only a text.
In this way, indifferent poems become critically significant simply because a respected reviewer read them in a particular way. And did so with enough style, intellect and confidence that others followed suit. This doesn’t mean the poem itself is irrelevant, but rather that its fate is collaborative. Greatness isn’t built into the lines, but built into the interpretation of them.
Some poems are lucky and find the right interpreter early, while others lie dormant for decades until cultural conditions ripen, and the right critic comes along.
We tend to think of criticism as a secondary act: reactive, not creative. But that is simply not the case. The best reviewers shape the work they comment on. They don’t just describe the poem, they also draw its meaning out of potential and into actuality.
Reviews don’t just evaluate a poem but participate in its creation. They give it a frame, a shape, that makes it recognisable as “art”.
