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11 January 2005: Today at the Shakespeare Fellowship, where I argue with wacks about who really wrote Shakespeare (taking the boringly traditional position that Shakespeare did), my belief that I am an expert in poetry was attacked. To precisely define expertise in any subject is not easy, but I'm sure that I have it in poetry, however defined. How could I not, having devoted over forty years to the writing of it, and to writing about poems, poets and poetics? Whether or not my writings have ever been published, or in any other way certified seems to me completely irrelevant. Assuming that I am reasonably intelligent and sane, which I have to assume.
I think I became an expert by the time I was about forty, but I was very slow. I think a person can achieve expertise in poetry by the time he's twenty-five or so.
Of course, there are many levels of expertise. Mine in poetry--or, to be exact--in the Nature of Poetry--seems to me now as high as that of anyone else I know of. This isn't quite the megalomaniacal statement it seems, for I don't feel the field has been much discussed by the world's best minds.
One opinion of mine on the subject is that knowing a lot of poems is eruditeness, not expertise. Ditto, knowing a lot of poetry criticism by others. Another opinion: one can be unerudite in poetry yet through analysis, analogization and generalization become expert in it. Exposure to poetry is important, but the ability to think productively about it much more important.
One can also be a brilliant expert in poetry and be ridiculously wrong about it at times. A corollary: a non-expert in poetry may know more about certain details of it than an expert in it--a major expert.
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