PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe Hatred of Poetry proceeds by a sequence of exemplary readings which foreground the centrality of virtual strategies in poetic making ... Lerner’s long essay is lucid and useful and finally overreliant on a distinction which settles less easily than he would like it to ... Despite its title, The Hatred of Poetry belongs to one of the genres it describes: the defense of poetry. Rarely have entries in that venerable line so insisted on poetry’s essential vulnerability, and rarely have they made such value of the felt insufficiency of participation in the form.