Close reading
«Since the time of Coleridge, there have been many brilliant poet critics, including T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Empson, Randall Jarrell, Donald Davie, Anne Carson and Paul Muldoon. The contemporary American poet Maureen McLane is one of these. Her My Poets (2012) combines humorous personal reminiscences (including a chapter called ‘My Impasse: On not Being Able to Read Poetry’), as well as provocative reflections on her changing understanding of American poets who were formative for her. The ‘My’ in the title foregrounds the crucial personal dimension of critical interpretation.»
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) - a modernist poet, contemporary and influenced by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams...
Poem «Marriage» - https://allpoetry.com/Marriage
T.S. Eliot - The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
200 Years of Afro-American Poetry, BY LANGSTON HUGHES
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69396/200-years-of-afro-american-poetry
«In this essay, published two years before his death, Hughes offers an historical examination of the trajectory of African American poetry (...) Hughes examines why most African American poets have been protest poets.»
«over the years, the basic and most pertinent subject matter of Negro poetry has been not love, roses, moonlight, or death or sorrow in the abstract, but race, color, and the emotional problems related thereunto in a land that treats its black citizens, including poets, like pariahs.” (...) «art is to be an intensification or enlargement of life»
Poetry Foundation - Essays on Poetic Theory
What is Art, by Leon Tolstoy (review)
The Kingdom of God is Within You; What is Art? (book in public domain)
A Selective Defence of Tolstoy's What is Art?
A short and interesing interview with John Ashbery, who died recently in 2017 - https://youtu.be/hDVZ-mWrX_s - where is adressed fame, poverty, art criticism and his views about reading poetry.
He was part of the NY school poets, that included Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and others - https://youtu.be/v-7C3MN1PIQ