What does it mean to be carried away? To be captured, carried off, liberated? To lose control of oneself? Lerner doesn’t show concern for questions like these. More generally, The Hatred of Poetry takes little interest in the rarities of technique across a poet’s body of work and avoids questions about his or her sense of history.

At The Nation, John Palattella covers Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Marianne Moore in a stirring rebuttal of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry.