No art has been denounced as often as poetry It's even bemoaned by poets I too dislike it wrote Marianne Moore Many more people agree they hate poetry Ben Lerner writesthan can agree what poetry is I too dislike it & have largely organized my life around it & do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry & the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore In this inventive & lucid essay Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets who would only corrupt & mislead the young) & both its greatest & worst practitioners providing inspired close readings of Keats Dickinson Mc Gonagall Whitman & others Throughout he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great & truly horrible poem the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communalexistence In The Hatred of Poetry Lerner has crafted an entertaining personal & entirely original examination of a vocationno less essential for being impossible