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Hi David! Your reply has made me think a bit more, especially about whether the commercial/consumerism angle sharpens the need for criticism. I suppose my view of this popular poetry is that showing how inferior Longfellow is to Shelley or Patience Strong to Emily Bronte (by various literary standards); showing how naive, or trashy or sentimental or lightweight this poor popular stuff is; is the most obvious and easy but least interesting thing to say about it. Beyond our desks (if not on them) is a vast, stupefying world of popular art. While we sit at home wrinkling our brows over dense knotty poetry, others around us are going to steampunk events, buying pearly birthday cards with messages of condolence, watching hillbilly TV about filling your face with burgers, reading Autocar and the property pullout in the Saturday Mail, reading through the complete Lee Child, making henna tattoos and hair-wraps, going on conspiracy forums, buying boy band calendars, singing in carol concerts, and about a million other activities about which we'll all have various gut reactions. Popular art matters because it mops up so much of our world's surplus value. To me, it just feels more interesting to try and understand what it's doing than to find it wanting. Perhaps I should shut up at that point, but I also think the line between this popular poetry and canonical art-poetry isn't clearcut. The taught canon tidies up the promiscuous mess of literary history. An instance that comes to mind from your list is that behind both Longfellow and Whitman lies the same poet, Scott. And the despised Longfellow tends to be taken a lot more seriously by students of the Kalevala and the Eddas (is the Kalevala art-poetry or popular poetry?). Why does it seem necessary for there to be "clear blue water" between popular poetry and what's accepted as art-poetry? Proponents of queer poetry and camp maybe posed that question first (e.g. Ashbery's "Variations, Calypse and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox"). Another view of this anxiety that has influenced me a lot is Johannes Göransson/Joyelle McSweeney meditations on the "Plague Ground" (specifically with reference to kitsch, but in the wake of the Gurlesque debate I referred to before), e.g. http://exoskeleton-johannes.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/future-of-poetry-by-joyelle-mcsweeney.html http://montevidayo.com/2012/12/its-still-too-much-the-plague-ground-of-poetry-in-the-age-of-internets-part-1/ >>>There was plenty of bad commercially successful poetry in the past : Martin Tupper or Patience Strong for example. Should they be exempt from criticism too? What about slightly more sophisticated bad poetry of the past - Betjeman's 'Summoned by Bells' - the individual best seller of the 20th century in Britain, or the Quarles emblem books or the Fitzgerald version of Omar Khayyam?? Isn't Longfellow wonderful, I chant sections from Hiawatha to myself every evening at dusk, followed by a selection of Pam Ayres for that contemporary touch. Have you heard the rap version of the Ingoldsby Legends? >>>>I think people like Kate Tempest or Holly McNish or Kaur or rap artists by and large are aiming to provide a commodity, a marketable product, and as a potential consumer I have every right to say, bellow or bleat 'No' in their various directions. It isn't a matter of a category error: I can certainly conceive there can be non-commercial rappers and I can imagine equivalents elsewhere. I recall a previous discussion where it was objected, re Tempest, that people were attacking 'a young woman at the start of her career'. I have no responsibility to support her career, anymore than I have an obligation to endorse bad footwear.