Sir, – Criticism is a genre in its own right, the art that comes after. It requires quite specific skills and insights. Good critics employ a maxim of charity: the ability to truly imbibe what someone else has produced, to see what can be got out of it, to praise and encourage wherever possible and to damn with faint praise if the worst comes to the worst, much as your own critic did with the recent poems of President Higgins. The intelligent reader doesn’t cherish sledgehammers.
Asking writers to write criticisms is a dangerous business. Frequently they are incapable of doing so, their heads being full of their own hubris. They have to be egocentric to get their stuff out but that doesn’t make for intelligent criticism of others.
I have no opinion on the poems of President Higgins, or on those of that former professor of Irish Literature in Boise, Idaho, Kevin Kiely, but I do have an opinion on his critique (published in Books Irelandand referred to in Loose Leaves, Weekend Review, February 11th) of the President's poems as a "crime against literature". That is not a critique at all, it is simply an insult. A very coarse blow to aim at a man with a lifetime of achievement behind him and who is still engaged in an important public role.
Nevertheless, I wish Kevin Kiely all the best. May the muse never leave him – or return to him soon, as the case may be. – Yours, etc,