We have received about a dozen letters protesting the tone of Edward Dahlberg's review of Conrad Aiken's Ushant (Poetry, February 1953), and one or two of our correspondents have asked for a statement of editorial policy regarding the prose we print. This is a good time to acquaint our readers once again with Poetry 's aims as a journal of letters.

Poetry was not founded as a literary review but as a kind of monthly anthology of poetry; as such, it has never pretended to reach great critical heights, although there are in our pages many famous and perhaps lasting contributions to the art of criticism. On the other hand, we pride ourselves on having remained the only eclectic journal of verse among all the hundreds of little magazines: we consider each poem in terms of its own achievement as poetry and without regard to the philosophical, religious, or literary beliefs of the poet.

In prose, we have always tried to follow the policy of freedom of judgment among reviewers. Most literary magazines have definite commitments about poetics, and a reviewer who prints an article in such a journal will try to meet the cultural prejudices as well as the critical standards implicit in that magazine. Poetry does not favor edited literary criticism or party-line criticism or laboratory criticism. Systematic and impersonal criticism does not seem to us to belong to literature, but to science and philosophy. We take the view that literary criticism should be subjective (but certainly not ad personam), passionate, humanly decent, and stylistically unique: we are inclined to judge a piece of criticism by how well it is written and not how "right" it is. Poetry does not attempt to legislate about poetics. It does, however, seem to us important to encourage subjectivity in criticism in order to counteract the operating-table approach of many of the professional literary journals. A good literary critic is bound to be subjective, however cool and analytical he may appear to be. In a critic we desire the profane virtues of intelligence, sensitivity, taste, and emotional maturity; we do not desire him to be what someone has cruelly called a "machine of sensibility."

The editors of Poetry do not predetermine the reviewer's attitude by telling him whether they like or dislike a book; we always open the prose mail with a bit of trepidation. When we select a reviewer we think of his qualifications as a writer and his interest in the particular author at hand. Only in the case of a severely neglected book do we seek out the critic and tell him our opinion in advance, i.e., that the volume appears to have some worth and that we should like him to review it for us. Throughout its career Poetry has encouraged poets rather than professional critics to review new books of verse and criticism. This is an indication of our fond belief in the fairness of mind and the soundness of judgment of poets. In no sense do we by to compete with journals of scholarly or professional opinion, and in no sense do we try to force the course of literary events.

But we are not blind to literary injustice, as our readers know. When the Saturday Review published an attack on the Eliot-Pound school of modern poetry in 1949, we replied by publishing a thoroughly documented refutation of their charges in a booklet called The Case Against the Saturday Review of Literature. This year we took notice of the widespread professional discrimination against the University of Chicago critics, whose basic theoretical work Critics and Criticism has finally been presented to the literary world. Without editorializing we have opened our pages to Professor Martin Svaglic of Loyola University, who delivers a brilliantly simple explanation of a dense and almost unliftable book. We favor neither the New Critics nor the Chicago Critics; but we mistrust and deplore any manifestation of literary politics.

In the case of Edward Dahlberg's review of Conrad Aiken's book Ushant, we believe that Mr. Dahlberg acted in good faith. The errors in misquotation, to the best of our knowledge, were neither serious nor deliberate.* If they were either, Poetry offers its sincere apologies to Mr. Aiken. As for the tone of Mr. Dahlberg's review, which was, and which he intended to be, withering, we can only apologize for what several readers perhaps rightly protested as our bad taste in permitting offensive rhetoric to appear in our pages. We did so in the belief that Mr. Dahlberg had taken a serious and well-considered position about Ushant and that he could not express himself otherwise. Mr. Dahlberg assures us that no personal affront to Mr. Aiken was intended. Poetry does not have an official opinion of Ushant or of any other book. The appearance of a review in our pages indicates only that we consider the work of sufficient value to merit criticism. Whether the criticism turns out to be favorable or unfavorable depends on the reviewer.

A young man whose work we had published once told us how glad he was that we liked his poems. We could only think, "Good heavens! We published them. Must we like them, too?"

— KARL SHAPIRO

*For these errors and our listing of corrections, see the Corrigenda Section in Poetry Chronicle. From PoetryJune 1953, vol. 82 no. 3.

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Edward Dahlberg's review