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William Logan has been called the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. All the Rage collects his early critical works, including reviews and verse chronicles, a long essay on Auden's imagery, an unpublished essay on "The Prejudice of Aesthetics," as well as a recent interview. A critic of uncompromising passions, his readings of modern poetry are irritating, intimate, severe, and luminous. Banned by some publications, his criticism has violently opposed the etiquette of praise that has silenced strong opinion among poetry circles.
Logan was among the first critics to review a generation of poets now in creative maturity, and his comments on the early works of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and the late Amy Clampitt show the enthusiasm of fresh discovery. But he is no respecter of old reputation, as his reviews of John Ashbery and Robert Penn Warren demonstrate. In total, his criticism considers virtues with their defects and always speaks its author's mind. Some contemporary poetry has had few better friends, and some few greater enemies, than William Logan.
William Logan is the author of Sad-Faced Men, Difficulty, Sullen Weedy Lakes, and Vain Empires. He is Alumni/ae Professor of English, University of Florida.

Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues to be a controversial approach to reading literature.

Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: “I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”

This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its chief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.