What’s the point of literary criticism?

Literary criticism functions as a vital practice for articulating the value of complex imaginative works, moving beyond mere economic or functional justifications. Helen Vendler’s career exemplifies this approach, as she championed "inhabiting the poem" to convey the pleasure of understanding lyric poetry. While her focus on inwardness and structural patterns provided deep insights into authors like Keats and Stevens, it occasionally limited her engagement with overtly political or protest-oriented verse. Effective criticism avoids the trap of rigid certainty, instead acting as a provisional, open-ended dialogue that invites readers to engage with the text. Ultimately, the discipline serves to communicate the quality of a work, nudging the broader conversation forward rather than seeking to establish definitive, universal rules of interpretation.