SOURCE: Disch, Thomas M. “Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry.” Hudson Review 52, no. 2 (summer 1999): 313-22.

In the following excerpt, Disch offers a negative assessment of Hay.

I have for a long time been of the opinion that writing poetry, like good manners at dinner, should be a commonplace among any group of cultivated people, and is not a specifically “professional” accomplishment. There will always be those who excel at it, as there are those who are handsomer or dance with more panache. But the often aggrieved expectation that the creation of a body of poems entitles one to a stipend sufficient to subsist on and have free holidays at an artists' colony seems to me grasshopperism at its most presumptuous. Yet such has become an article of faith not only among poets of the middle rank, especially those who conduct writing workshops for a living, but also among the...