And what is this diff we're getting at? Isn't it deep down a difference in feeling, between the expats & the Americans, between Stevens & Eliot? a funny feeling, as in a reverse mirror the diff between Russian exile community (Nabokov etc.) & those who stayed home (Akhmatova, Mandelstam); and if there is a connection with poetry here, doesn't it have to do, ironically, with the universal Latin vs. national vernacular?

At issue here, anyway, is the lingua franca et jocundissima.

Which takes on new colorings as the years go by.

Don't get me wrong, though : I'm not on the side of the literary nationalists or the literary literalists. Eliot was right, Melville was right, Everyman was right : the cabala cabal of writing runs silent, runs deeper, runs universal.

But back to the main question. Remember the Maine. Poetry in english & Amurrcan vs. Expat. How oddly these issues are reflected in the dilemma of the burning Bushdom & the world Household. That is I mean the Amurrcan concept of kick-the-can vs. the global sopholeum of gettalifedom.

Hey, talk!!

But back to purrtry. The crux of the future (of purrtry in catfish, I mean), as I see it, lies in the difference between how Melville re-wrote Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Classics, generating a new American Bible (Moby), on the one hand, and, on the other, the impact of Dante on Eliot & Pound. The difference in their stances toward the literary past, I mean. The difference = Dante, oddly enough; the diff between Latin & vernacular.

Jive mutha.