Is any critique truly objective?

[Leanne]

I think of it like first aid: are they breathing?No. Then fix that before moving on to bleeding.

Could not agree more, Todd. As we gain experience as critical readers -- and bearing in mind that "critical" does not mean "censorious" -- it becomes easier to figure out if a poet is writing poorly because he/she is new to poetry or if the poem really was just ill-considered (which happens to the best of us) and needs serious attention. For the newbies, I generally try to start out with obvious things that are easy to fix, like wiping out cliches or not trying to jam something into rhyming couplets, so that they can have an immediate sense of achievement and at the same time learn something they probably never thought about before.

Once those easily-fixed-but-terminal-if-unchecked problems are out of the way, then we can move on to the more complex stuff.

Oh, and the original question, I suppose I should address that: no, it's really not possible to be completely objective when reading any artistic text, but that certainly doesn't mean we should stop trying. Whether we like a poem or not, we should still be able to give a reasonably balanced critique of it.