When Death of a Naturalist appeared in 1966, it was received critically. Not with hostility: the book was appraised in the daily and Sunday papers, in the weeklies and literary magazines. The reviewers were experienced readers (and some of them writers) of poetry; they addressed a readership that was curious and itself appraising. The same thing happened when James Fenton's Terminal Moraine appeared in 1972. In 1977 Robert Wells's The Winter's Task and in 1978 Jeffrey Wainwright's Heart's Desire were widely commented on. A new book of poems provided an occasion for engagement, and reviewers wrote with expectation and an enthusiasm for poetry. The personalisation of the product came later.

A receptive critical culture comes and goes. 'Let the public ask itself,' wrote T.S. Eliot in 1920, 'why it has never heard of the poems of T.E. Hulme or Isaac Rosenburg, and why it has heard of the poems of Lady Precocia Pondoeuf and has seen a photograph of the nursery in which she wrote them.' Edgell Rickword provided a corrective to the Pondoeuf syndrome in the mid-1920s and helped to shape a critical discourse capable of encompassing Modernism and more conventional new writing. In the 1930s critical categories were politicised, with an inevitable dissipation of seriousness, and in the 1940s the odds were gone again, returning (in a severe form) in the early 1950s. A volatile but continuous critical culture - insisting on engagement with poems - persisted through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Will such a culture emerge, in general form, once again? There are journals where appraisal happens, but poetry does not command the wider attention and respect, the fire and ice, that it did even into the early 1980s. At present, poetry doesn't much matter: poets do, their lives, opinions, what they spend their prize money on, the problems of publication, the mechanisms of dissemination - the sociology of poetry, as it were, rather than poems. Where there was critical space, there is now feature space, so long as the poet has a marketable angle, a 'symbol of security' that recommends him or her (in an editor's estimation) to the larger reading public.

It is doubtful that an Eliot, a Rickword, a Jarrell, a Grigson, a David Wright, a Davie, an Alvarez, an Ian Hamilton, with their very different valencies, could emerge now. Few newspapers or weeklies have the editorial continuity or stability to provide durable bases for substantial critics. A critical culture requires contrasting and complementary perspectives on what is happening. Should such tense stability again exist, is there any longer the possibility of a common critical language for appraisal and debate? All the poets and critics mentioned above are male: the critical cultures that have existed this century have been deddedly such: honourable exceptions - themselves poets -including Patricia Beer, Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Jennings, Elaine Feinstein, Carol Ann Duffy - have not had long runs and the basic discourse was not fundamentally altered by their presence. The increase in the number of published women writers has been much commented on, but will serious appraisal follow?

While Rickword - who wrote on Donne, Swift, Rimbaud and others - was critic enough to appraise Eliot, Mew, Riding, Graves, Roy Campbell, risking judgement of the new as any committed critic must do, it is hard to identify a critic with the breadth and authority to appraise (and perhaps scrutinise) the diverse work currently on offer. Rickword made his living as an editor and reader. His life depended on it. So did Edward Thomas's.

Robert Lowell said that the greatest loneliness of the writer is not when he is starting out and unread, but when he has become so large that he is no longer criticised - that loneliness which surrounds the monster and the celebrity, a compound of pious respect and jealous loathing. Several writers who began their careers in the 1960s have attained this bleak eminence which is perhaps more comfortable than neglect, but can feel like it: but those who emerged later, or emerged less decisively, suffer a more debilitating invisibility. There is no legitimation: television or newspaper feature-celebrity is ephemeral, and when poems like The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc or In a Time of Violence are not appraised, they are not assimilated and read. They do not become canonical because the canon is arrested at the stage where the critical culture failed.

Its failure is not solely the fault of changes in newspaper ownership and priority or alterations in broadcasting and media policy. In part it has to do with the fragmentation of critical discourse, following on the heels of theoretical or political divisions which inevitably fragment the literature they arise from, foregrounding gender, gender preference, ethnicity, class, political complexion, requiring privileged status for the work they seek to legitimise at the expense of works of different provenance. There is also the fact that the majority of poetry reviewers and critics today come from an academic environment, not the treacherous freelance environment in which risk is the order of the day and where there is the continual excitement of the new, rather than the effrontery of it.

Is there a critic who can deal with J.H. Prynne, with Seamus Heaney, with Graham (W.S. or Jorie), with Rich and Dickey, with F.T. Prince and Derek Walcott and John Ashbery, with Geoffrey Hill and David Constantine, with the best new writers (identifying them, naming and demonstrating their qualities), with the urban and the rural, the modern and the anti-modern, not in terms of movements or polemical positioning, but first and foremost in terms of the words combining on the page, the sounds and tones those words make, the senses they give, and how they extend or revive elements in the language we share? If, that is, we share a language. It is on that hypothesis that such a critic will have to work. We can all share the congenial gossip of other lives; gossip dressed in journalism, with an arresting photograph, will sell books to a market. It will only rarely commend a book to a reader.

Magazines like this one, Agenda, modern Poetry in Translation, London Magazine, Poetry Review and Stand, seem driven (very differently) by the old-fashioned prejudice that, against the partisan or theorist stands a body of general readers worth addressing. That prejudice could regenerate - keeping its distance from the academy - a common language of criticism more broadly based than earlier ones, more curious and tolerant, but no less demanding. If such a language emerges and works its passage into the newspapers and weeklies once more, there will be a critical context for the new writer more compelling than the feature and performance culture which now exists, marginalising the poet who will not or cannot lend imagination to the requirements of performance or self-dramatising exposure. The poem will then matter once more, the main thing, the processes of making. The question will not be, 'Who made it?' but the Coleridgean, 'What has been made, how well has it been made, and was it worth making?'