>It would be interesting to know how American poetry relates to that 
>history, and indeed how much the follow-up to American "High 
>Modernism" which has been so much valued here, was assisted on its 
>travels by the massive impetus and financial support given by the 
>state to the exportation of American culture in the 1950s. After all 
>a lot of the American, or at any rate New York, poets firmly 
>attached themselves to the art world, as French poets did right 
>through the century.  So if we say that the Americans kept the great 
>French poetical flame alive and the British let it fizzle out, we 
>might just be saying that the great sales campaign worked. And the 
>poetical 'advance' was of course accompanied by a great deal of 
>anti-British invective, of which some recent remarks on this site 
>sound like a rather wearisome recapitulation.


I doubt very much, Peter, if much of this went on in relation to 
modernist poetry. The art world connection, via curatorships and 
criticism, is at any rate limited to 4 or 5 poets over three generations.

>And the result of all that of course is that we end up dividing 
>poetry into two. Whatever pseudo-philosophical or descriptive terms 
>we used to identify the halves hardly matters. The identification of 
>what is ahead is predicated by what has been sold as ahead when 
>ahead was made to work as a product label (and still is, but now 
>subject to counter-claims).


In the US at any rate nobody's selling poetry, but there are jobs and 
other perks, and the divide is largely a matter of the equivalent of 
Movement types hogging the trough. I think everyone on the other side 
no matter how defined would be happy to be let closer to the goodies.


>Mark mentioned that the upper modernists are not such hot goods 
>these days over there. In a way it is a relief, because the rhetoric 
>of their promotion meant we had to take them en bloc, the whole 
>works. Wyndham Lewis made some valiant attempts in the 1920s-30s to 
>distinguish what was of value in all this stuff, but the concept and 
>lesson of his book-title The Demon of Progress in the Arts seems to 
>have gotten very deliberately lost.


In writing it was really only a few lifelong expats. I don't think 
many American poets think of Eliot as an American. I was referring 
sp[ecifically to him. He's still taught, of course, but I don't think 
anyone in any faction is learning from him. Stein is another matter, 
as is Pound.


>I recently tried to read all the Cantos. I reached 105, which I 
>thought was valiant on my part, before closing the book in disgust 
>never to open it again.


I've never sat down to read the Cantos in order, though I've read all 
of them in blocks. It's not, I think, a work that has enough 
structure to demand being read in order. As I've read it there's a 
lot of wonderful stuff. nd it's been a rich schooling for many.

>I could immediately think of at least 30 British poets of the 
>earlier C20 I would turn to from this with immense relief, minor and 
>modest as many of them may have been, though not in any meaningful 
>sense empirical and all of them certainly seriously affected by the 
>symbolistes (rather than the later perversions and cheapenings of 
>that poetical moment, such as Apollinaire or Breton).


I have to disagree with you about Apollinaire, whi I think is doing 
something quite different from the symbolistes. Reverdy and Jacob are 
also essential. And for me Jammes, as well.

>Fortunately I have a sense that it is coming to an end, the dualism that is.

Let's hope so. The conceptions of what poetry is for are so far apart 
that I doubt there'll be any quick rapprochement, but it would be 
nice if we could all recognize each other's right to exist.

Mark