From Whining Poets: They attend each others readings and pretend there is a place for them someplace else in the literate universe. That is delusional, but its a fiction they all hold on tojust as they hold on to the idea that they are under-read and under-appreciated. Their usual posture is a sort of hang-dog look of disappointment and loft y superiority, a difficult combination that they manage with the same irritating panache observed in perpetually misunderstood teenagers.
Edward Cifelli is a retired professor of American Literature. He has written literary biographies of poets David Humphreys and John Ciardi and is completing a new book on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He has also edited collections of poems, essays, and letters, and introductions, afterwords, and prefaces for the Signet Classics editions on Dante, Milton, and Longfellow. He wrote a memoir Random Miracles that was published in 2011—and he spent 13 years as the movie critic for a daily newspaper, the New Jersey Herald.