SOURCE: “Proseurs,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 104, No. 1, January, 1996, pp. 142–49.

In the following excerpt, Gwynn criticizes Hall's use of publishing sales figures to defend modern poetry in Death to the Death of Poetry.

What happens when poets turn their hands to prose? We might expect that they would have an easy go of it, wouldn't we? Prose, after all, is easier to forge than poetry. Prose writers are spared having to learn phrases like medial caesura or substitute foot: all that each of them has to know is how to put a semicolon in its place and make subjects and verbs agree. Poets, on the other hand, go mad worrying about such silly matters as when to end their lines; now that everyone uses a computer, prose writers have even that minimal decision made automatically for them, courtesy of Bill Gates. Any hack can write a sentence like “So...