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I mean that I can't find any satisfactory way of separating one from the other once and for all. We all believe we are good judges of poetic merit, but we could argue about it forever without agreeing which poets have it. Meanwhile, canons are being made by the people who have the power to make their views count, editors, journalists, anthologists, writers who've already made the grade. (And many of these, one could argue, owe their power to 'merit'.) I think some version of this state of affairs must always have existed, and it's hard to see how there could be pure literary values that are innocent of this kind of politics. Best wishes Matthew Francis [mailto:[log in to unmask] 01443 482856 -----Original Message----- From: Lawrence Upton [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: 17 April 2000 14:16 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Some remarks on publishing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Francis M (HaSS)" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 17 April 2000 12:14 Subject: RE: Some remarks on publishing | When was it otherwise? Success always depends on power. It's hard to see how | you could ever hope to separate power from merit in an activity like poetry | in which no objective measurement of success is possible. Are you saying that power defines what is asserted to be meritorious? Many who have some power / success in poetry seem to me to be lacking in sufficient poetical merit to justify the success / power L %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%