. . . But whence cometh this bicameral poetics? I don't think it's simply self-interested polemics. The deeper fault line probably goes back to John Donne's era. When God was no longer understood as Love & Knowledge together, the split between Love & Knowledge, Faith & Science, began. A gradual breakdown of the idealist concept of Nature & the Good, so that the beginning of the 20th century witnessed the final flip-over, the revolutionary displacement of Apollonian by Dionysian humanity : "love" understood philosophically & psychologically as only a veil for subconscious desire, the ideal countered by the anti-ideal, the "knowing", the disenchanted.

The effect of these thought-movements on art was of course manifold : art's basic drive to depict or reflect was no longer guided by an accepted or singular logos or mythology; it began to depict chaos & disorder. The "order" imposed by Modernism is an order of the autonomous artifact.

Such order based on the thing-in-itself sets up a fundamental division between artifact and communication. Perhaps it is this basic division - between the urge to "make" a wholistic thing/machine/poem on the one hand, and the urge to communicate fact, truth, values, on the other - which is reflected in the partisanship of "mainstream" & "experimental".

(Meanwhile the agon between Apollonian and Dionysian - between a verbalized icon of the Ideal and a representation of the commanding power of Desire - sets up an endless productive/empty tumult, since, ironically, the heart's desire is not satisfied by either of them : neither by a detached verbal formula of the Good, nor a worldview framed by impersonal, deterministic hedonism, ie. fulfillment through sensuality.)