“So what are those pleasures? What is the point? The core act of literary criticism sounds simple. It is sitting down with a bit of writing and thinking about it. Then there should be a head-exploding moment of making connections between its different bits and perhaps bits of one’s own experience or stuff that’s happening in the world now or which was happening in the world around the person who wrote it. Sometimes the thing you’re reading will seem baffling to start with. But the key thing to remember is that it once mattered to someone enough to make them shape it and write it down, so there has to be something there, even if finally you decide it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did to the person who wrote it, or that it doesn’t really work. You might think about the way it manages to create a particular effect and you might learn how to write from thinking about the way it’s done (are there tricks, bits of compositional magic you can learn from?), or you might just feel a shiver at understanding something you never thought could be understood. Sometimes you get a sense of seeing someone else’s world, or a world you didn’t think was there. And once you have worked out a way of understanding the poem or the novel or the play then you have to convey it to someone else. A good critic is a kind of lightning conductor who picks out the energy in what they read and passes it to others.”
From Colin Burrow’s “Good Weird or Bad Weird”, a review of Helen Vendler’s last essays in the London Review of Books, 48: 16, 10 Sept 2026.