Leukemia felled American poet Charles Bukowski in 1994, but not before a long and eventful life battling a legion of demons: acne, booze, bad women, self-doubt, self-loathing, fear, aging, and the literary establishment. Though Bukowski penned some of American literature’s finest poems in his career, literary respect and recognition never materialized. Somehow, Bukowski never seemed to achieve poet status. In essence, whatever criticism did attend to his work steadfastly withheld the acknowledgment that Bukowski was a poet at all. Instead, numerous critics dismissed him as a bad tempered drunk with accidental flashes of literary astuteness, mostly alcohol induced. To this day many critics view Bukowski as a juvenile poseur who simply published his autobiography over and over (Ulin 1). Over the years, the sustained popularity of his work seems to have done little to shift this interpretation. At the heart of Bukowski’s contentiousness lies the perception of poetry’s value, its relevance, and its purpose. Is poetry an academic pursuit meant to be studied and analyzed critically, or is poetry a rare and simple form of human communication best recorded, like Bukowski’s work, unpretentiously, some might say brutally? This paper explores the persistent bad reputation that continues to haunt Bukowski and his work, and offers some insight as to why his work fails to attain its fair share of academic respect and recognition. Bukowski’s entrance into the American literary canon remains barred, according to some critics, thanks to his audience. One of the most consistent criticisms hurled Bukowski’s way, and one of the justifications for his bad reputation, appears as the observation that his work appeals to those who don’t understand, or value, the true rigors of poetry (Kirsch 132). Bukowski is not a poet, apparently, because his readers and fans are not poetry aficionados. In his critique Smashed, Adam Kirsch writes, “nowhere to be found in the canonizing Norton anthology, however, is the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet: Charles Bukowski” (Kirsch 132). Bukowski remains one of the bestselling American poets. In fact, Kirsch writes, Bukowski “has sold millions of books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages – a commercial success of a kind hardly known in American poetry” (Kirsch 132). However, Bukowski’s commercial success in this regard seems to have actually degraded the critical relevance of his work, and made critical acceptance harder to come by. In Kirsch’s words, “even at his most unheroic, [Bukowski]…is the hero of his stories and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert approval. That is why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with little experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire” (Kirsch 136). In the New York Times book review of Bukowski’s 2007 collection The Pleasures of the Damned , author Jim Harrison admits his surprise at “the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy” (Harrison 1). Tellingly, the critic immediately confesses, “I’ve been reading Bukowski occasionally for 50 years and had not