education in public

Allen Tate said, describing his own critical essays, “I simply conducted my education in public.”

Quoted in “The Exercise of Reverence,” Essays on Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003) by Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

critics' poet

As Henry James has required already, so Stevens will require the work of many an esthetic theorist and analyst to educate his public of the future. Supplementing the old dichotomy of the “readers’ poet” and the “poets’ poet,” it is possible to coin for Stevens a third category, that of the “critics’ poet.” The universities will have their joy explaining him long after the more popular poets are deservedly forgotten.

—Peter Viereck, “Some Notes On Wallace Stevens,” The Trinity Review (Vol. VIII, No. 3, May 1954)

immense minority

I believe in the "great poet," who isn't the one who reaches the widest public but the one who creates the most public. Even greater would be the poet who could build the total, immense minority. That is my own illusion.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics of Work, ed. & trans. by Christopher Maurer (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1997), pp. 25-33