Another point from yesterday : Dantean song vs. Melvillean naturalism, objectivity. Poetry/prose; faith/scepticism. That's too simple really, but it's related to the old debate about how to get prose values into poetry, or, in another key, the conflict between literary hermeticism & literary morality, or art-for-art vs. art for truth. Crux of Dantean poetics was to resolve this conflict on the side of art-for-truth, to send the troubadours to Purgatory. Crane votes for a Platonic synthesis : reality is musical. But in doing so he resolves the issue of the purpose/role of poetry only by veering very close to solipsism. The debate crops up again in the role-playing of Eliot & Pound (one's Dante to the other's "miglior fabbro"). (Dante is more serene than Crane because his faith is more firm - he reads the text of God in the book of His works. Crane turns the finding of the harmony itself into the cause for song : thus the Other is re-absorbed into the Same (isn't this the goal of all storytelling?), and the Bridge revolves on its metaphysical ground.)

But Dante's faith that he is commissioned to speak eternal truths in poetry - the confidence thus granted - leads paradoxically to a poetics grounded in empirical precision. The poet who can speak of death & eternity will not have difficulty spelling out the geometry of ethics and politics in petty Florence, or the whole earth's puny threshing-floor.

Jump now to somebody like Frost. This is a very subtle writer. Frost's persona of the old-time NE farmer is a kind of allegorical effect of literature/poetics itself. The mask allows him to meld high art with speech aimed not at fellow litterateurs in their solipsistic cells, but at the ordinary reader, Everyman, Everywoman.

These two I guess are models still - models for a future poetry in english. Not so much models of technique but models (perhaps unfashionable at the moment) of literary ethics. I'm not referring to their personal lives, but to their faith in a concept of poetry which configures it within, rather than separate from or as a shelter from or as a consolation for, life as a whole. "When the work is play for mortal stakes" - that could be Frost's keynote. Crane's not really much different - in his poetry, reality itself plays and flowers, that's his argument.