Vendler on the Critics’ answering look
"The senses and the imagination furnish rhythms for the poet. The rhythms of the poet translate themselves back, in the mind of the reader, into the senses and the imagination. What is it about the critic that cannot rest content with this silent transaction? Most of the time the critic is just another reader, and can put a book down, whether with appreciation or with irritation, without any wish to write something about that book. Yet certain books will not let the critic look away; they demand a fuller response, and they will not let go until another set of words, this time in the critics own prose, renders again the given of the book. Something in the book – or in a single poem – is [to use Wallace Steven's phrase] " a hatching that stared and demanded an answering look."
…from the introduction to Soul Says, On Recent Poetry (Harvard, 1995) by Helen Vendler
