Northrop Frye pointed out three levels of critical response to literature: the scholar, the academic critic, and the public critic. Knight's article deals primarily with Bowering's essay entitled, "Metaphysic in Time: The Poetry of Lionel Kearns" from Bowering's collection, A Way With Words. Bowering's literary criticism is part of the Black Mountain poetic movement, in which it is believed that the poem is not an autonomous and unified artifact, but is rather part of the flux of the phenomenal world. Because the public critic has no larger system in which to criticise (the Black Mountain movement not being large enough), Bowering is forced to misread poems that do not agree with his system of poetics.
