This nonsense from Camile Paglia is making the rounds. I don't have time to do much more than sneer at this, but as usual the people who decry postmodernism seem not to really understand it very well.

The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time. [emphasis mine]

Can anyone tell me what she's talking about? That's what poststructuralism means.

For me, poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle.

Uh, Camille, I hate to break this to you, but speech itself is an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle.

Good writing comes from good reading. All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. Technical analysis of a poem is like breaking down a car engine, which has to be reassembled to run again.

Okay, now the problem is starting to come into focus. Paglia doesn't think literary criticism is complicated. Well, she's wrong. It is. Literary criticism is a highly specialized field with its own highly specialized discourse; you wouldn't expect a random person to be able to come in off the street and do it anymore than you'd be able to, say, expect a random person off the street to be able to come in, take apart a car engine, and then put it back together again.

That doesn't mean you need a PhD in English to read a book and understand it. You don't need a PhD in economics to do your taxes. You don't need a PhD in biology to breathe. But the idea that any person should be able to craft a rigorous understanding of any text is as postmodern -- in the most pejorative sense -- an idea as that any person, anywhere in the country, is as qualified as any expert to discuss the Theory of Evolution. Knee-jerk populism and 'common sense' have their limits. Some disciplines are hard and require effort to master.

The mere fact that literary theory is difficult and a little abtruse at times doesn't make it evil.

Paglia also says this, which seems to be at the heart of her beef with postmodernism:

The sacred remains latent in poetry, which was born in ancient ritual and cult. Poetry's persistent theme of the sublime - the awesome vastness of the universe - is a religious perspective, even in atheists like Shelley. Despite the cosmic vision of the radical, psychedelic 1960s, the sublime is precisely what poststructuralism, with its blindness to nature, cannot see. Metaphor is based on analogy: art is a revelation of the interconnectedness of the universe.

Or maybe this sort of aesthetic mysticism is incomprehensible hoo-hah. Maybe the whole notion of "the sublime" is just another structure to be studied. Maybe it's just another text.