The history of literary criticism is deeply laden with the discussion of poetry, but homing in on its particular and peculiar value as a form of art can feel like a daunting prospect—one regarded with an almost superstitious fear by many poets themselves, perhaps because of a lingering folk memory, sown by Keats’s ghost, that might link such endeavors to the unweaving of the rainbow: the experience extinguished in its explanation. The best literary criticism has always been complementary (if not necessarily complimentary) to the art, however: a meditative exploration and articulation of principle that feeds the roots of our reading and is therefore vitally connected to the possibilities and processes of our writing. As an essay in the understanding and enhancement of the kinds of experience that poetry offers and involves, Eric Falci’s The Value of Poetry makes an excellent contribution to this tradition. Falci acknowledges the book’s necessarily...

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