ASIDE: a poetry critic’s highest duty, after defining what poetry is with maximal possible objectivity and detailedness–neutrally, is to describe with maximal possible objectivity and detailedness a school of poetry, neutrally, with a neutral description of maximal possible objectivity and detaliedness of at least one poem representative of that school. Valuable but secondary would be a description of the school (and poem’s) relationship to prior and contemporary schools and poems. The ideal poetry critic would describe all schools of poetry.
Evaluation is an imprtant part of a poetry critic’s function, as well. Seemingly very subjective but I’m working on the possibility that (a reasonable degree of) objectivity is possible. Also (relatedly) that there are absolute statements that can be made as to what a superior poem is. One is: “A superior poem uses a minimum number of words to achieve its aesthetic purposes.” A counter to that I immediately thought of was a dramatic poem depicting a garrulous man; wouldn’t it have to be garrulous? Probably. Still, I say that it would use a minimum number of words (and other elements, I just remembered to add) to achieve its aesthetic purpose (or purposes), in this case, the depiction of a garrulous man. The poet would have to use more words, for instance, to tell us about the man’s feelings about a flower than he would have to express his own poet’s feelings about the same flower, but in the former case, in an effective poem, his extra words would convey his feelings about the man, not the flower, and he would use as few extra words as possible to get across his portrait. Similarly, a free verse poet may use fewer words to convey his view of a flower than a formal poet would writing about the same flower–but the formal poet’s extra words might be necessary for his great ambition of telling us about the flower and making some metrically or in some other melodational way pleasurable.
The poet’s challenge here is to balance a great number of maximums–a maximum of freshness of diction, say, with a maximum of clarity. In the preceding example, a maximum of verbal music with a maximum of concision. A proper evaluatory poetics would list all the maximums needed, then ordain that a poem was effective to the degee that it came close to having these maximums. I think they could be given different weights; a maximum of methphoric interest should rate higher than a maximum of melodational effectiveness, for instance.
All this is tentative, brainstorming more than anything.
It occurs to me that one would use the list on a case by case basis. Use it for a single given poem, determine what the poem does, then from that a hierarchy of maximums. A Dylan Thomas’s poems seem in general to be intended more than (the English versions of) Basho’s haiku to have verbal music and less to be aiming for maximum conciseness.