Jonathan & Tim, I appreciate both your comments. But I think the whole lineage issue is a distraction, probably because I'm having trouble articulating exactly what I mean.

When I wrote about the avant-garde's dismissal of past poetry, or its framing of Whitman or Dickinson (for example : & you could find any number of examples) as avatars of resistance coming out of nowhere, I did not mean to insist on some standard stereotypical model of conservative poetics, in which the Great Figures, the classics, serve as Models for their ephebes & epigones.

Yes, the avant-garde, or the post-avant in Ron's term, may be obsessed with their own lineage; but the lineage is brought to the fore as a defense of an over-all agonistic paradigm, in which the "avant-garde project" (Steve Evans' term) is a project of critical thought (uniting poets with thinkers and activists more generally) which dis-establishes bourgeois values & systems (the "classic" futurist ideology). The attitude of the avant-garde toward the extended traditions of poetry is really a subset of this larger project.

Obviously and undeniably, each historical era produces new states of consciousness, new values, new faiths, new despairs; even the most traditionalist of the modern poets were engaged in the deepest rethinking and rewriting of the worn-out, deteriorated sensibilities and styles of romanticism and symbolism.

What seems worn-out and delegitimized to me, now, are artistic programs driven by the late effects of 20th-century ideologies. When I quoted some mathematician a few days ago, who wrote that "when faced with an insoluble problem, make it bigger", what I had in mind was enlarging and subtilizing the concept we have of literary influence and the influence of the tradition, the poetry which has become a natural force in the culture at large. In my view the poetic process is precisely an activity of working through and beyond ideological formations & cliches, by means of a more intimate engagement with the achievement of great poets emanating from former cultural eras and crystallizations. What this intimate engagement results in is a discovery of perennial human concerns, passions, longings, breakthroughs : the very definition of "classic" and classicism. This is not an artificial or reactionary process in any way : the intimacy of a poet with a past poetic spirit leads to the authentic re-discovery of the Real and the perennial.

The re-discovery of the classic is also a discovery of the normative. The avant-garde dismisses the normative as bourgeois or reactionary. But it is precisely this extreme position which makes the political edge of avant-garde poetry ineffectual. The greatest threat to the abusers of nature, freedom, and justice on the right, for example, will not come from their opposite numbers on the left, but from the center of normative humane values. This is true for politics in general and for its aesthetic manifestations too.