This is interesting:

any critic who wants to write something lasting—who believes that criticism can be a species of literature—must write partly out of aggression. Or perhaps a better word is animus, in the sense of a fixed intention, a partiality.

Must animus be mean, though?  That's another question.  What would it mean to have an edge, but not be mean?  That I guess is the issue I'd like to think about more.

Criticism must have a kind of pushy energy, meaning to clear space for its own positive pronouncements:

Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” gave formal statement to this agonistic element in all artistic ambition. “To imagine is to misinterpret,” Bloom writes, which means, among other things, to misinterpret all existing poetry to its own detriment in order to make room for something new.

I've thought that Bloom's position was a bit too cock-fighty, in several senses, for a long time; in the 90s I read a great book on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop entitled An Enabling Humility, by Jeredith Merrin; Merrin's still seems to me the more accurate, and unsuprisingly more generous, approach.  Bloom now strikes me, perhaps unfairly, as too continuous with Trump.

But back to Kirsch's very interesting essay.  He makes the further point that “Eliot argues in his criticism that difficulty is the only possible approach for a truly modern poet to take.”  This is interesting, because (and I had never made this connection before) it places Eliot firmly on the Adorno side of one of the crucial stylistic arguments of the twentieth century, that between Adorno and Orwell, on whether or not language should be clear or difficult (a debate very much still worth having inside each of our souls, as this article helpfully made clear long ago).  

It also connects up Orwell with a native English line going back at least to Samuel Johnson who was the one to name the “metaphysical” poets of the 17th century (Donne, Marvell, maybe Herbert), where “metaphysical” was, as it has so often been in English intellectual life, a term of abuse and sneering.  Eliot’s defense of the metaphysical poets is in fact an assault on the idea that “plain old common sense” might be adequate for reality.  

Almost a hundred and fifty years later, Eliot insists that the standard Johnsonian view of poetic history has things backwards. The metaphysicals were not a dead end, but instead the embodiment of an intellectual vitality that poetry needs to rediscover. If they appear strange and artificial, that is only because English readers have lost the expectation that a poet should appeal to the mind as well as the ear and the heart. Eliot’s essay concludes by drawing a direct line from the seventeenth century to the twentieth:

"Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning."

(That last is a passage, embedded inside the article, from Eliot.)  This is no surprise, really, given that Eliot wrote a dissertation on the Hegelian philosopher F H Bradley.

Furthermore, Kirsch makes an interesting distinction between “literary journalism” and “criticism”: “Literary journalism describes and explains literature and ideas as they are…Criticism tries to move literature and ideas in the direction of what should be.”  That seems to align with a distinction the essay also usefully borrows between the criticism Eliot writes and “what Eliot calls “impressionistic” criticism, an approach which ostensibly offers “the faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind more sensitive than our own.””  This is helpful for me, for “impressionistic” criticism of this sort does seem to me important, even if Eliot doesn’t think it’s the best kind.  (It may be the kind, for instance, James Wood writes.)

For now, though, the key thing I take away from this essay is: What would it be like for criticism to have an edge, but not be cruel?  That, I guess, is the issue I'd like to think about more.