Obviously the wine was getting to me last night, & I apologize to my readers for the scatterbrained incomprehensible vagaries of yesterday.

& what were the main points?

1. The ancient notion of time-space : the future physically "behind", the past before them; thinking of this while pondering the futurepastness of poetry in english.

2. The hypothesis that poetry is deeply motivated by a kind of gyroscopic drive to achieve balance out of crisis & chaos : the pressure of the upheavals of 20th-century only intensifying the poetic search for origins, models, stability/reformation.

3. Remarking unavoidable brightness of the Moderns in that retrospective - their own renaissance of past poetries made new. & in the American context, a divided stream, divided between the expats who sought a synthesis of the Western tradition as a whole, and the natives, still engaged in the project of creating an independent New World center of gravity.

4. Pound & Eliot gravitating toward Dante; Crane (& Williams?) toward Melville & Whitman; Stevens finding sort of a middle path, emanating from the British (Shakespeare, Romantics). Frost, like Stevens in a way, finds a New World context without violent breaks with the English past. My aim is not to oversimplify, but to look at the general tendencies as a start toward a perspective.

5. US developments in poetry in english similar to colonial situation around the world, with the difference created by ascendant global political power. If the future is behind our backs, it's global english seeping through; it's the dramatic increase in available translations - the globalization of literary tradition(s) - with the concomitant difficulty in sorting out the bland globalized re-makes from authentic work. These new developments cast a different light on, create a new context for, the project of the "American Renaissance" or the project of the Moderns (both expats & stay-at-homes).