Critics can be creative – look at Malcolm Cowley

Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James railed against the practitioners of literary criticism long ago:

So much preaching, advising, rebuking & reviling, & so little doing: so many gentlemen sitting down to dispose in half an hour of what a few have spent months & years in producing. A single positive attempt, even with great faults, is worth generally most of the comments and amendments on it.

The American critic Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) escapes these anathemas because early in his long life he was a poet of some distinction. For nearly 70 years, too, he produced essays and books which together constituted a literary history of the United States. He was at the topmost notch of second-rate minds, or (as his dedicated editor Hans Bak might claim) on the lowest rung of the first-rate. Moreover, as Bak’s selection of Cowley’s correspondence shows, he preferred to advise and improve other people’s draft work, or to explain and praise published work, rather than to rebuke or revile.