[In the following review, Benedict describes Birkerts's attitude toward poetry in The Electric Life as intellectually challenging yet provocatively open to debate.]

Sven Birkerts—who won considerable acclaim for his first book of literary criticism, An Artificial Wilderness, and who won the l996 National Book Critics Circle award for criticism—writes in a voice that veers between passionate harangue and smart-aleck banter. He is not too arrogant to engage the reader in debate, for even when he sounds contemptuous he leaves open a back door for disagreement, but he does tend to be annoyingly, though wittily, snide. "Poetry is now largely a face-saving operation, with poets pulling their bitterness inside out and preening themselves on their own uselessness," he writes in The Electric Life. Mr. Birkerts, who teaches at Harvard University, contemplates the declining state of literacy in our television-addicted age and tries to discover how, and if, poetry fits into our world. He discusses the ruinous effect of the electronic media on our minds, offers a reverential study of inspiration and conducts a rather precious debate on what makes poetry political. Mr. Birkerts then explores why he loves certain poems and, in brave defiance of academic tradition, attempts to find out what makes a poem beautiful. He proceeds to more conventional criticism, some in the form of analyses of the poetry itself, some in the form of attempts to analyze the poets. Mr. Birkerts clearly loves the stuff of which he writes, and his love is catching. This is a book for poetry readers who wish to be awakened by fresh arguments—intelligent enough to challenge yet provocative enough to be open to question and debate.