"Gee willikers, Hen," sez Socrates, "you're waxin summit polemickal there, ain't it? Uh mean it is a stretch nowzadays to be exclamatoriatin about an Eliotic Trudgdition, thinksme! Havn't such as Wallie Stevens, for landsakes, proven oncet & for all that America has its own autochthonic ways & means - like when he said quite clearly if offhandedly that he disliked the critical habit of allus hearin the voices of other poets in a poet, as if a poet couldn't simply just be him or herself - etc & so forthus. . ."

Well, thanks, Socky - at this point (on a dark & snow Monday morning at the office) all I want to say is that one of the striking aspects of whut I been calling the oppositional poetics of the USA is that the "tradition" in roughly Eliot's sense is always an unheard interlocutor or double of the style at hand - whether it be the obsessive formalism of the langpos or the chipper lightweight quality of the NY School or the primitivist-pioneerism of the Projectivistickal set - there is always the broad wide universal tradition of poetry in English serving as the invisible agonist or antagonist to the oppositional style