The Poet as Literary Critic: Reading, Judging, and Belonging

Welcome to the seventh class of the Versopolis Traineeship, a series dedicated to expanding the horizons of poetic practice. This session – The Poet as Literary Critic: Reading, Judging, and Belonging – is a reflective, essayistic lecture by British poet, biographer and literary critic Fiona Sampson, exploring the rich and often fraught terrain where poetry and criticism meet.

What happens when a poet becomes a critic? How do you write about the work of others with care and clarity – without losing your own voice? And how can criticism become not a threat, but a deepening of poetic practice? Drawing on her unique dual role as both a maker of poems and a longtime literary reviewer, Sampson offers a compelling meditation on what it means to read deeply, to judge responsibly and to belong to a literary tradition that demands both sensitivity and rigor.

Far from positioning poetry and criticism as antagonists, this class explores how they might in fact be extensions of one another. Sampson reflects on the poet’s responsibility not only to write, but to read attentively – and to respond with honesty and insight. For her, literary criticism is not about policing taste or asserting authority, but about joining an ongoing cultural conversation. It is a form of deep reading that listens for intention, form, context and resonance – a way of entering the work of another as a co-thinker rather than a gatekeeper.

The lecture moves fluidly through several interrelated strands: how poets read the world and each other; how reviewing functions within a literary ecosystem; how to write a good review that is both generous and exacting; how to metabolize being reviewed – with all its risks of misreading, projection, and vulnerability – without sacrificing one’s inner compass. Along the way, Sampson draws on examples from literary history and today's time showing how many of the great poets were also critics, and how criticism itself can be a poetic form of thinking. She also offers practical insights: what makes a review meaningful rather than performative? How can you write about a peer without falling into diplomacy or cruelty? And how do you hold space for complexity – both in the work and in your response to it?

At its core, the session makes a powerful argument: that the poet-critic is not a divided figure, but a whole one – someone who engages literature with openness, depth, and ethical awareness. The act of reviewing, when approached thoughtfully, becomes a way of writing with rather than about others; a space for refinement, connection, and lineage. The class includes a recommended reading list of poems, essays and critical texts, inviting participants to expand both their reading habits and their imaginative scope. Viewers are encouraged to think of criticism not as judgment alone, but as a slow, attentive act of reading – one that builds literary community as much as it clarifies aesthetic values.

Whether you are a poet beginning to write criticism, learning how to navigate feedback, or seeking a more profound way of reading, this class offers a wise, generous and enduring companion to your creative and critical practice.

Further Reading:

You will almost certainly find some of these books maddening. Some will deal with books which, in turn, you have no interest in. But that, in a way, is the point of reading them: to test out your own reactions.

• Martin Amis: The War against Cliché: Essays and reviews 1971–2000 (London: Vintage, 2001)
• Peter Barry: Poetry Wars: British poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Cambridge: Salt, 2006)
• Harold Bloom: The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages (London: Penguin, 1999)
• Stephen Burt: Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading new poetry (St Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2009)
• Louise Glück: American Originality: Essays on Poetry (New York: FSG, 2017)
• Richard Howard: Paper Trail (New York: FSG, 2004)
• F. R. Leavis: New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)
• Sean O’Brien: The Firebox: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945 (London: Picador, 1998)
• Darryl Pinckney: Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
• Craig Raine: More Dynamite: Essays 1990-2012 (London: Atlantic Books, 2013)
• Christopher Ricks: Reviewery (London: Penguin, 2002)
• Virginia Woolf: The Common Reader Two volumes (London: Vintage, 2003)
• Fay Zwicky: The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival 1974–1984 (Crawley, WA: University of West Australia Press, 1986)
• Jan Zwicky: Lyric Philosophy (Edmonton AB, Canada: Brush Education Ltd, 2017)