I guess my previous post by two tends toward a sense of the poet as some kind of Suprematist/Genius/Original. But let's not over-emphasize all that (nothing new there). What I'd like to express, instead, with this notion of anomaly or originality, is the sense of, for lack of a better phrase,

some irreducible subjectivity : like the blind spot we can't see through. & art & originality emerge from that subjective area of experience, & of necessity come out original & different - because they do indeed flow from that anomaly, that uncertainty situation, that never-before-known because never before realized or existent... shadowy region, Amazon jungle, unknown...

place of creativity & poems - of chasms & leaps -

& a GPS grid simply cannot place this particular but essential aspect of the whole deal.

So a critic (of a few centuries back, probably) would describe my (or anybody's) list of "seraphic" poets - the makers of transcendentally perfect poems - as those in whom the genius of Nature shows forth. (& this would agree with the idea of art as imitation of nature.) Beautiful poems have something inimitable & preternatural about them : the genius that makes artificial things which are almost as complex & amazing as the works of nature itself. & yet they are nature, too.

(Bacon, by the way, seems to have an interesting idea that the value of "historical poems" (epics, history plays, etc.) lies in the fact that they show events & people as better than they are in ordinary life - as more transparent or knowable, more worthy of imitation. In a sense this is the role played now by the movies.)

... so there might be a causal relation between the "rule of nature" and the disinterested sense of taste.

But then craft & artifice - the formal training of native talent (or genius) - would parallel the "educated" taste.

There seem to be some echoes of Kant in my remarks yesterday about the "strict measures" of beauty. Those places in the Critique of Judgement about "genius". Poetic genius - being the effect of Nature working through the poet - is what applies the "rule of nature" to the products of art. (I'm getting this from the McKeon essay.)