Stephen Burt, Poetry's Cross-Dressing Kingmaker Gillian Laub for The New York Times The critic at rest: Stephen Burt, in Harvard square. When I asked Stephen Burt's parents if they worried about him when he was young, Burt's father, Jeff, replied by asking me if I was Jewish. I told him I was. "Well," he said, "to ask Jewish parents if they were worried about their children - it is a statement of fact! But were we more worried about Stephen than about the other children? As a boy, Stephen, the eldest of their four sons, was, in his dad's words, "extremely precocious"; his parents" reminiscences make him sound lovable but very intense, with interests out of step with other boys his age. His mother, Sandra, told me that in third grade he wrote an essay about "a little boy whose mother forced him to go out and play." What would happen to him? Jeff remembered thinking. What would he become? Who would marry him? What he became was, among many other things, one of the most influential poetry critics of his generation. Burt is 41, a professor of English at Harvard, heir to the intellectual mantle long held by giants like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. He is also an avid science-fiction fan, the founder of a short-lived indie-pop zine, an authority on women's basketball, the husband of Jessie Bennett, with whom he has two sons, and an unabashed cross-dresser. Bennett often helps Burt pick the women's clothes that he wears for special occasions - parties, poetry readings - though he says that he never dresses like a woman in the classroom. "For the same reason that you wouldn't teach in a tuxedo," he says, "because the classroom is about the poem, not about you." Burt has published two full-length books of his own poetry and two of the shorter volumes known as chapbooks, but in the poetry world he matters because of his criticism. Being a major poetry critic in the United States today may seem like a dubious honor, almost akin to being the best American cricketer, or a distinguished expert on polka. Yet we still teach poetry to our children, and we still reach for it at important moments - funerals, weddings, presidential inaugurations. We tend to look askance at those who claim to be practitioners, skeptical that their work could be any good. We mistrust our own tastes, so we rely on the tastemaker. Burt is not the only young scholar whose reviews introduce new poetry to the masses, but he alone seems to be everywhere. He reviews for Web sites, magazines and major newspapers, including this one. He networks at conferences, on campuses, on Facebook. And he is a passionate booster of poets he loves. Not everyone believes he's a great critic, but few doubt that his opinions help dictate who becomes part of the canon (and thus college syllabuses and high-school classes) in the way that the opinions of Bloom and Vendler and Stanford's Marjorie Perloff (all of whom are around 80 years old) have for the last several decades. That Burt sometimes wears a dress and talks hyperkinetically about obscure indie bands like Sarge or the graphic novels of Posy Simmonds has not diminished his influence but enhanced it. As Willard Spiegelman, the editor of Southwest Review and a respected critic in his own right, wrote recently about Burt's tastes: "Yesterday's meadow morphs into today's High Line, Keats's Philomela into Lady Gaga." Burt is the critic who, more than any other, understands the here and now and "flourishes amid the hipsters and the sonneteers." In the 1980s, Laura Kasischke started publishing short, confessional, often dark poems about motherhood, family and domesticity. She had fans, but Burt felt that she deserved more. Starting in 2000, he wrote reviews praising her work. In 2007, he discussed Kasischke in his book "The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence." The next year, in Boston Review, Burt wrote that "Kasischke has invented a new way for verse to sound" - anyone can recognize that as a serious compliment. In 2009, he reprinted the Boston Review essay in his book "Close Calls With Nonsense"; and, in 2011, he reviewed Kasischke's new book, "Space, in Chains," for The New York Times Book Review, writing, "No poet has joined the chasm of ontological despair to the pathos of household frustration so well as Kasischke." This past March, "Space, in Chains," won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Burt was one of the jurors. To nonpoets, the perks of this attention may seem trivial. Even if a poet gets a big award, her next book may sell 2,000 copies instead of 200. But when the only real currency is reputation, the blessing of a major critic matters. Other poets start to read your work, and if they teach in master's programs, their students - the next generation of poets - read your work, too. "It has made a huge difference in my career, " Kasischke, who teaches at the University of Michigan, told me. He hasn't put my poetry on the best-seller list, but I think people read him. And because he goes everywhere and speaks, and has mentioned my name, it has made a difference with other poets and with readers. Burt has other favorites. Among living American poets, he has also championed Rae Armantrout, who is associated with the "language poets," an avant-garde movement that began around 1970 (Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010); the poet and attorney Monica Youn; and the long-neglected Allan Peterson. Some dead poets, like Lorine Niedecker, are coming back to life, or at least being read again, in part because of Burt's ministrations.