What Kirsch doesn't convince us of is his cold-blooded bottom line, which is that if art is to be great, it often must take precedence over life, regardless of the costs.
"[9] But in a review in The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani praised the book, calling it "eloquent and very astute."
She added: Mr. Kirsch ... does a wonderfully nimble job of conveying each poet's individual achievement and the evolution of his or her style, as apprenticeship gave way to maturity, as new techniques and language were invented to accommodate new ideas and material.
Writing in a manner that is at once erudite and accessible, Mr. Kirsch proves equally adept at dispensing the sort of close readings of individual poems championed by the New Critics and at explicating correspondences between a poet's life and art in a fashion that would have been anathema to the high modernists.
Regarding The Modern Element, Starnino wrote that Kirsch is "an incomparable context builder, with a near-perfect nose for comparisons.
[and] is excellent at placing poets in their historical moment, aided by an ability to evoke the way the climate of a period manner can suddenly be made to pivot into the private weather of a poem.
"[13] Starnino also had mostly positive things to say regarding Invasions which he called "an advance on the 'silent, parcelled, and controlled' poems of the award-winning The Thousand Wells."
Starnino's only criticism of the poems was that he believed that Kirsch's wording could sometimes seem antiquarian and that his strictness with regard to form could be limiting.
In a review of Kirsch's nonfiction book Why Trilling Matters, William Giraldi of The Daily Beast praised the Trilling book as well as Kirsch's previous nonfiction works: His Benjamin Disraeli is an expert, emotionally astute study of the complicated Jewish-English statesman and novelist, and The Wounded Surgeon and The Modern Element, his two books on English-language poets, rise to Dr. Johnson's criterion for lasting criticism: the conversion of mere opinion into universal knowledge.
In Why Trilling Matters, Kirsch has turned his considerable gifts to the mind he most resembles in comprehensive literary and cultural understanding.
[15] Kirsch also generated controversy when writing an article for the Wall Street Journal titled "Is It Time To Retire the Term 'Genocide'?"