I think I got to the main issue in my comment to Ron's WC Williams post of yesterday, which was that Williams' true antagonist there was Eliot, and Eliot's notion of tradition. Perhaps my word for that notion, "love-clasp", was a bit baroque.

The notion is that poetic tradition is profoundly anachronistic, working against time & succession. The reason for this is that the poet is as much a listener & reader, as speaker & writer, responding to the music as well as making it.

The idea of the Classic is loaded, controversial in our era. But the best way I can imagine understanding it is to think of poetry - to try to remember how I responded to it as an adolescent, when ordinary life on the one hand had a certain wholeness to it (books & intellectual things only part of a general effervescence), while on the other hand "books", "poems", were things: distant, solid, heavenly objects, rather than blips or word-streams in an all-consuming Library of information & commentary.

I'm not describing this as well as I'd like.

In this adolescent context - when literature is a healthy Otherness and paperback books are strange cherished objects - think of the Classic as a kind of representative formulation of a distant time & culture. Ie. whether it's Homer or Dickinson or Sappho or Rimbaud, what the adolescent reader sniffs & senses is an affinity for the wholly human within a wholly-different time & place. & that affinity - that blend of identification, curiosity, exploration, & desire to imitate - is the substance of the communication, the correspondence, and the source of the pleasure & excitement of reading.

Again I'm really expressing this poorly, but the presence of the Classic-as-affinity is the very - the essential - thing which draws out or draws toward the representative "abstract" (Stevens' sense) in our own efforts.