But critics don't achieve lasting stature. Jim was perhaps as good a critic as he was a poet. He was more important to me as a critic than he was as a novelist. His published criticism is superb. As a practicing writer he was able to understand better than civilians.
Most criticism is written by people who've never published anything.
Most critics are practicing either a form of wish fulfillment or a form of revenge. That's true, by the way. Jim, as a critic, was writing from the standpoint of one who could do it, and in many cases could do it better than the writer he was writing about. So he approached the process of assessing other writers work with a knowledge of it, a familiarity with the profession of literature that civilians can't have. I think his poetry is more important than his fiction.