Eliot Weinberger

Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in language.  Yet he is one of the half-dozen poets who are widely read; and of them, the one whose work is most frequently imitated by fledgling poets and students of 'creative writing.'  His success, however, is less disheartening when considered as an emblem of an age—perhaps the first in human history—where poetry is a useless pleasantry, largely ignored by the reading public.

Eliot Weinberger in Written Reaction: Poetics Politics Polemics (1979-1995)

More recent work by Weinberger, one of our livelier critics and writers, here and here.

—David