Does this poem suck?

My poem-of-the-day calendar turned up this gem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had never heard more than the famous first line. ("How do I love thee? Let me count they ways.") I was stunned by its simple eloquence:

HOW do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seem’d to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

So I went home all excited about this poem, looking it up in my anthology of Victorian literature. Where I received the jarring news that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is certainly not a poet "of major status." And her best-known poem Aurora Leigh is "very bad." And that the collection this poem is from, Sonnets from the Portuguese, is "quite bad too."
Hmmfph!
But then I cruised over to Amazon.com to find reviews of my mean-spirited anthology, which is The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose and Poetry, edited by Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. Reviewer K. Elliott states:

This anthology appears to have been transported in a time machine from the 1950s. It is narrow both in its range of authors and subject matter and completely out of step with recent Victorian studies.

So ha, ha, ha!

Who is Michiko Kakutani?

Do you know who Michiko Kakutani is? Call me a latte-swilling, sushi-eating cultural elite, and I will tell you that she is the New York Times chief book critic.
Writing for the online magazine Slate, Ben Yagoda has a suprising, detailed critique of Kakutani as a stylistic bore with a thumbs up/thumbs down critical mentality. Read it here.
(I had to look up the word "dyslogistic" in the review. It means expressing disaproval.)
I've usually enjoyed Kakutani for having high standards. She's not afraid to trash a book. But I do think she's a bit stale. According to Yagoda, she's been reviewing books for the NYT for 25 years, which is probably why I think that. That's waaaaaaaaaay too long for anyone to write about a single topic, especially at a daily newspaper. I'm a big believer in beat shuffling, i.e. moving writers around to cover different topics on a regular basis. The longest someone should be on a beat is six years, or if they're really good, maybe 10 years. Giving people new challenges keeps things fresh for both the writers and the readers.
Who is this critic's critic, Mr. Yagoda? I'm not sure. The author's note says he is the author of The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing. I'm going to have to look into that book, it piques my interest already.

Rwanda

I saw the movie Hotel Rwanda a few weeks ago, and it inspired me to seek out Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.
The movie is chilling -- psychologically taut and compelling. At times it feels like a horror movie, perhaps because it captures the real-life horror of genocide taking place in the world in 1994.
Gourevitch's books is an expansion of reports he wrote for The New Yorker magazine. I think he's one of the finest foreign correspondents I've read. His reporting on North Korea has been frightening but also extremely perceptive.
We Wish To Inform You, meanwhile, is just what I was wanting to read after the movie: more history, more analysis, more reportage, to try to discover more meaning from the slaughter of a million people. To call the genocide "senseless" is almost a cop-out: It lets us off the hook of trying to understand precisely what happened. Gourevitch is very sensitive to that dynamic, and he is not afraid to make value judgements based on his extensive reporting of the facts at hand.
PS Gourevitch recently became editor of the Paris Review.