3.30.2006

I agree with everything Ange Mlinko says here.

ON THE OTHER HAND,

I think poets DEMAND to have it both ways.

In other words, poets & poetry oscillate between self-expression and objectivity, between the expression of personal emotion and the framing (perspective) of distances and evaluations.

The polemical among us (in the great tradition of Pound & Eliot) insist on one or the other: ie. the "extinction of personality", precision, the objectively perfect, the image, etc... or (in the Harold Bloomian neo-Romantic polemic) everything that is the other case.

Thus polemic proves itself unclean.

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