An offhand email comment by my old college roommate sent me to reading Alexander's Bridge, Willa Cather's first novel (really a novella). The well-written intro discusses the impact, in the early 20th century, of the sometimes-muckraking McClure's magazine, where Cather worked. Led me on by propinquity to Wings of the Dove. (I've never read much Henry James. Deep sentence-joy.) Will have to read more of this kind of stuff. May paddle over to Faulkner, too, like Mr. Latta.

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If a poet can write just one poem which escapes his or her own private mud-puddle, & begins an independent life, & enters the anonymous main stream of public value....

But we poets inhabit a querulous & over-excitable large-size pond, burdened with too much writing, troubled with the general angst &/or indifference of society-at-large. The literary glut is perhaps a symptom of a more general imbalance, between the caffeinated technical-verbal-media economy, practical existence, simple happiness...

In America the serious quandary, among poets, over the history & future of style & literary form, has held such an abiding interest over the last century - we are bored & fascinated with it by turns. Poets try to resolve the situation by Group Effort, by pronouncements, judgements, prognostications... meanwhile the gnarly difficulties of the art-form itself stymie all but a few. And few are the critics ready to try the hard thankless labor of really sifting for themselves, & setting up a personal canon of contemporary poets who have somehow - by dint of avoiding the treacherous pitfalls, the multifarious culs-de-sac of the striving literati - managed to surpass all that & their own limitations, & have made something, if not great, at least solid & substantial & authentic, a step toward the great & lasting... Thankless because the Groups are not ready for this kind of disinterested approach... & America hasn't decided yet, not by a long shot, what kind of Poetry it wants...