Harold Kaplan's humanism

Posted this comment to another blog today, Josh Corey's, covering the AWP conference.

"Funny, Kaplan is probably the very last scholar-critic anyone at the current AWP would ever be reading....

but I see a thin phosphorescent clamshell path leading through his work back out to poetry....

Kaplan sets the humanism of Stevens & WCW against the authoritarianism of Eliot & Pound, without denying that all 4 poets were searching for the real social value or sanction of poetry; he also sets their humanism against the dissociations, determinisms and reductions of contemporary literary & philosophical trends.... he suggests that his position on the nature of poetry & literature is akin to that of Emanuel Levinas, who has written strongly against the depersonalization & defacements of post-structuralism... it's a kind of realism in which authors are responsible for their works and establish a "triangulation" between author, reader, & the work... civilization itself is grounded on the substantiality of persons, and in literature the person, the human face, shines out... but the main thrust of Kaplan's book is a reading of the opposing attitudes of Stevens/WCW vs. Pound/Eliot, on the ethical status of human imagination & its expression in poetry.... He shows how these issues are still with us, & suggests how poetry might climb out of its current infatuations with everything that reduces, rather than builds up, the human & the personal..."

Here's the Google link to Kaplan's book...