George Herbert by candlelight

If you've attended a poetry reading in the past, say, twenty years, you've probably heard it: the Portentous Hush . This is what Joseph S. Salemi, a poet and Professor of English in New York, once provocatively identified as "the single most destructive and off-putting characteristic of contemporary confessional lyrics": an attitude of reverence that cancels out criticism, and would merely have you listen to the recitation of morally earnest verses "as if they were a religiously sanctioned revelation".
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