p.s. if I were to re-write those comments quoted in Octopus, I would probably rein in some of the grand abstract claims about poetry & zeitgeist. Mandelshtam, Dickinson, Dante... each had their own unique, characteristic ways of expressing some of the metaphysical questions in relation to poetry. Mandelshtam, for one, made explicit in his essays that poetry-making & poetics are always a living, developing, changing process.

Yet I wouldn't renounce the comments entirely. Even though the insights of the Chicago critics, which I've been talking about over the last couple weeks, have helped me recognize certain critical distinctions - which, if they were put into play, would take the reading of poetry far deeper into the particulars of individual works - still, I think that those critics' forthright renovation of Aristotle's Poetics - after a hiatus of a few thousand years - chimes somewhat with my essay's theme of anachronism.