All the Rage

Series

• Poets on Poetry

William Logan has been called the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. All the Rage collects his early critical works, including reviews and verse chronicles, a long essay on Auden's imagery, an unpublished essay on "The Prejudice of Aesthetics," as well as a recent interview. A critic of uncompromising passions, his readings of modern poetry are irritating, intimate, severe, and luminous. Banned by some publications, his criticism has violently opposed the etiquette of praise that has silenced strong opinion among poetry circles.

Logan was among the first critics to review a generation of poets now in creative maturity, and his comments on the early works of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and the late Amy Clampitt show the enthusiasm of fresh discovery. But he is no respecter of old reputation, as his reviews of John Ashbery and Robert Penn Warren demonstrate. In total, his criticism considers virtues with their defects and always speaks its author's mind. Some contemporary poetry has had few better friends, and some few greater enemies, than William Logan.

William Logan is the author of Sad-Faced Men, Difficulty, Sullen Weedy Lakes, and Vain Empires. He is Alumni/ae Professor of English, University of Florida.

Praise / Awards

• "What sets Logan conspicuously apart from his contemporaries is his refusal to dissemble, his indifference towards [sic] received reputations, his capacity to remain—as Robert Lowell said of Randall Jarrell—'tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable.' . . . Logan's hard thinking, straight talking, and elegant writing make [All the Rage] an indispensable touchstone for anyone interested in contemporary poetry."
  —Dennis O'Driscoll, author of Weather Permitting, Verse