Good essay by Brian Phillips in current Poetry on "taste" & contemporary anxieties in poetry world... concludes without definitive "conclusions", an invitation to new ideas. Very worthwhile reading.

Would like to respond somehow, & am looking over essays around Chicago School, quietude, ethos etc. for guidance.

... 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.

The "rubrics" posted yesterday probably stem from one underlying principle : Beauty is the substance/structure of poetry. A corollary of this is the notion Jonathan Mayhew was talking about recently : Taste is an impersonal response to an objective reality (beauty).

The strict measures of beauty - not political polemics & allegiances - are what drive the merchants of the "poetry market" from the temple.

One could just as well say that Taste is a personal response to a subjective reality, if one were Kant, I guess (I'm not very well-grounded in philosophy). (Maybe this is what Jordan was getting at in his comment to Jonathan the other day.) But I'm not Kant, and I'm going to assume, with Charles Peirce (I guess), that we apprehend, imperfectly, the real objective existence of certain things, which we name with universal terms (ie. universally applicable).

& now I'm way over my head.

The irreducible fact of taste - a corollary of the irreducible fact of art itself - presents literary criticism with its lease on an independent, autonomous field of inquiry : distinct from other forms of allegiance or intellectual endeavor.

Today Jonathan clarifies some of the distinctions between taste (an aesthetic response to an aesthetic object) and judgement (appreciation, &/or critique, which combines both taste & a set of standards). Judgements will differ because standards differ. Taste informs judgement - judgement refines taste.