And what is this diff we're getting at? Isn't it deep down a difference in feeling, between the expats & the Americans, between Stevens & Eliot? a funny feeling, as in a reverse mirror the diff between Russian exile community (Nabokov etc.) & those who stayed home (Akhmatova, Mandelstam); and if there is a connection with poetry here, doesn't it have to do, ironically, with the universal Latin vs. national vernacular?

At issue here, anyway, is the lingua franca et jocundissima.

Which takes on new colorings as the years go by.

Don't get me wrong, though : I'm not on the side of the literary nationalists or the literary literalists. Eliot was right, Melville was right, Everyman was right : the cabala cabal of writing runs silent, runs deeper, runs universal.