Heather McHugh: The Other’s Mine (July 1997)

Heather McHugh’s dazzle of language plays its light on how numbers can work in poetry as a way to reflect on larger questions of the relationship between criticism and creative art–the “measurer’s intelligence” vs. “the poet’s flare and flame.” Arguing that our internal poets and internal critics actually need each other, McHugh conducts close readings of poems by Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, and Shakespeare to show how, in poetry, “the art of numbers is the prompting of a numberlessness.”