I'm happy to see someone's reading the archives. Jonathan Mayhew writes:

"So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream
Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."

. . . but I don't think I said that, exactly. Or if I did I didn't explain myself properly (this is back in the early weeks of this blog).

Firstly it's important to distinguish between the "Eliot tradition" (which is NOT what I mean) and Eliot's notion of "tradition" (which is something like what I mean). Secondly, I did not say that poets ignore tradition at their peril. I think I said that the various oppositional streams in US poetry emerged in conscious or unconscious differentiation from the tradition (in a large expansive sense of that term). In other words, poets DON'T ignore this tradition - they play off against it.

Finally I think in various postings, esp. regarding the idea of metaform, I tried to get at the idea of poetry as immediacy, event, "nowness" - that there's a way of looking at poetry in sort of a worldwide sense as a distinctive activity, in which "tradition" is always new, always emerging "now" - this is of the essence of poetry.

I admit that this idea of a category or frame which includes US poetry is unsubstantiated & controversial. But it does also seem to me that there is also a lot of evidence that, at least in its more polemical manifestations, different styles of US poetry have emerged in very clear dialectical contrast with whatever is considered traditional or establishment or mainstream or passe style.