SOURCE: A review of The Electric Life, in The New York Times Book Review, April 16, 1989, p. 2.

In the following review, Benedict describes Birkerts's attitude toward poetry in The Electric Life as intellectually challenging yet provocatively open to debate.

Sven Birkerts—who won considerable acclaim for his first book of literary criticism, An Artificial Wilderness, and who won the l996 National Book Critics Circle award for criticism—writes in a voice that veers between passionate harangue and smart-aleck banter. He is not too arrogant to engage the reader in debate, for even when he sounds contemptuous he leaves open a back door for disagreement, but he does tend to be annoyingly, though wittily, snide. "Poetry is now largely a face-saving operation, with poets pulling their bitterness inside out and preening themselves on their own uselessness," he writes in The Electric Life. Mr. Birkerts, who teaches at Harvard University, contemplates...