Correction... it's a video by 11 year old boys. But who can tell the difference these days?
3.09.2008
a semi private letter about poetry
a paragraph by Milosz, pertaining to criticism:
Every author should be sensitive to criticism, should ponder it for a long time and draw conclusions from it. This statement is not as obvious as it might seem. There have been periods in the history of literature when a dismissive attitude towards criticism was part of the writer's toolbox and progress was made despite it. Critics are sometimes more susceptible to stylish and purely transitory slogans than the authors they discuss, and flogging their 'isms', they construct a ponderous machine which is slow to move forward. Finally, young writers, if they are too responsive to criticism, lose more than than they gain, because their vision, strongly felt but imperfectly conceived, draws upon them thunderbolts, which they may easily attribute to the vision itself, rather than to its flawed execution.
Every author should be sensitive to criticism, should ponder it for a long time and draw conclusions from it. This statement is not as obvious as it might seem. There have been periods in the history of literature when a dismissive attitude towards criticism was part of the writer's toolbox and progress was made despite it. Critics are sometimes more susceptible to stylish and purely transitory slogans than the authors they discuss, and flogging their 'isms', they construct a ponderous machine which is slow to move forward. Finally, young writers, if they are too responsive to criticism, lose more than than they gain, because their vision, strongly felt but imperfectly conceived, draws upon them thunderbolts, which they may easily attribute to the vision itself, rather than to its flawed execution.
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