Poetic Virtues - NYTimes.com The audience for poetry is like a vastly reduced version of the audience for college football - superstitious, gossipy and divided into factions no less fervent for having only an occasional idea of what's going on outside their own campuses. It's a hard crowd to write for, and the critic who sets himself up as a color commentator inevitably struggles to find a style that can please Peter without needlessly riling up Paul. James Longenbach is one of the finest scholar-critics working today, and his method for dealing with poetry's fractious readership is simple: He just tells all parties they're wrong. In "Modern Poetry After Modernism" (1997), he pointed out that we "exaggerate the formal and political idiosyncrasy of postmodern poetry." In "The Resistance to Poetry" (2004), he suggested that "poems have resisted themselves more strenuously than they have been resisted by the culture receiving them." Typically these counterintuitive arguments are delivered so reasonably you feel as if you've been not so much corrected as nudged into rationality. Longenbach's latest book, THE VIRTUES OF POETRY (Graywolf, paper, $14), examines "the virtues to which the next poem might aspire," which will obviously get the attention of poets but should also appeal to general readers. Each chapter is organized around one or two concepts - compression, doubt, otherness and so on - that Longenbach uses as a fulcrum to lift some impressively complex argumentative machinery. The opening chapter, for instance, explores restraint and plainness in poetry, qualities Longenbach describes as arising from a "surrender" that lets a poet "wither" into his proper style. He means it as a compliment. "The surrender of the will is itself impossible merely to will," he writes, "and we may struggle with the act of surrender more deeply than we struggle with the act of rebellion." Because fashion currently favors poems that are frenetic and knowing, the poet whose gift is for a plain style needs to give in to his or her own best impulses. As Longenbach notes, a different writer might need to surrender to "worldliness and excess." In making these points, Longenbach covers Proust, early and late Yeats, the aural difference between Germanic and Latinate words, William Blake, Andrew Marvell and George Oppen, all in about 12 pages. This historical breadth is typical: "The Virtues of Poetry" is meant to provide perspective on poetry's long tradition that will help readers resist "the renegade engines of taste." So we get a thoughtful treatment of Pound that leads to Susan Howe, and a smart take on intentionally bad writing that moves from "King Lear" to Elizabeth Bishop. But if Longenbach believes in tradition, he isn't exactly traditional. A better description might be anti­reductionist. Throughout these essays, we're repeatedly asked to consider how Style A is actually compatible with (or a version of) Style B, and vice versa. The chapter called "Infinitude," for instance, draws a parallel between Whitman and Louise Glück, who are typically viewed in relation to each other like Jack Sprat and spouse. But then, typical views are Longenbach's bête noire. While "The Virtues of Poetry" is thoroughly civil, you can sense the professorial cool slip whenever Longenbach feels poetry is being sacrificed to conventional wisdom or clubbiness. He mentions a review that called Yeats an "unlikely model" for today's writers - to which Longenbach saltily replies: "Why? Because he arranged syllables into rhythms? Because he doesn't live in Brooklyn? Longenbach's exasperation is understandable, but his unhappiness with jargon, ginned-up conflicts and breakthrough narratives - all staples of the poetry world's eternal quest to do something really, really new this time! - can occasionally cause him to understate differences that actually do matter. In a discussion of revelation in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, for instance, Longenbach asserts that "the apparently reticent Bishop has been used as a club to beat the apparently revelatory Lowell, much as Lowell was once used as a club to beat the apparently impersonal T. S. Eliot." He loses me here at "much as." Lowell and Eliot were born almost 30 years apart; Lowell and Bishop were peers. And Eliot and Lowell were both men. Contrary to the implicit suggestion, these are not small differences. In focusing on ­poets and poems, Longenbach sometimes moves too quickly past questions about which poets, and what poems, and why: the very questions that "renegade taste" confronts, however unsatisfyingly. But this is to dissent only mildly. The implicit advice of "The Virtues of Poetry" - always read for maximum complexity, and with maximum patience - is as valuable as it is frequently ignored. Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay a poetry critic is that you thought of his writing the next time you encountered a good poem - which is exactly what I did when reading Fani Papageorgiou's disconcerting and magnetic first book, WHEN YOU SAID NO, DID YOU MEAN NEVER? Shearsman, paper, $15. Papageorgiou's poems are small - mostly under 15 lines - and composed in a spare but conversational free verse that rarely breaks the rules of everyday syntax (there's even a poem here called "Modal Verbs"). They often begin with slightly off-kilter observations ("I'll tell you all about the battle of Copenhagen"), frequently drift into aphorisms ("The man who stepped out for a paper / and never came back / lives inside us all") and generally have identifiable if quirky subjects: children's games, the Glasgow coma scale, the word "marasmus," peacock feathers. But what most distinguishes Papageorgiou's writing is its peculiar embodiment of two of the concepts Longenbach dwells on at length: compression and dilation. Compression refers to the sense that a poem's language has been scrupulously pared down; dilation occurs when a poem's language has been allowed to go so slack that it seems almost unpoetic.