On the purpose of the critic

"DW: Some critics see their job as helping the rest of us avoid bad verse, yet you seem to be committed to helping readers learn what's necessary to read what a wide variety of contemporary poets are up to. How do you conceive your reviewer's/critic's role?

SB: Most bad verse is verse nobody needs help in avoiding, because most bad verse--and much good verse--passes through this world almost unnoticed.

Reviewing is a subclass of the wider activity called literary criticism. The role of a literary critic is to say interesting things about literary works, especially (but not only) to say things which make the works themselves more interesting, wiser, more informative, or more fun for their readers and re-readers.

The role of a poetry reviewer is to say things that help people (a) discover and (b) appreciate good poems. ("Good" of course is subjective--how subjective, and why, are matters for debates elsewhere.) That role leaves room for many different kinds of writing, many different attitudes individual reviewers can adopt. Some reviewers are like disc jockeys, playing representative work and juxtaposing it with other works that make it sound even better, then adding a comment once in a while. Other reviewers resemble archaeologists, painstakingly recreating the contexts you'd need to understand what an artifact meant to its first readers. Still other reviewers seem like entertainers, monologuists even, who want to "convince by their presence" (as Whitman says) rather than by dispassionate analyses."

Good interview with Stephen Burt here.