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Malcolm, if language poetry is not a style, what are the writing programs co-opting? Why should it bother anyone? They must have heard SOMETHING. Blackmur believed that the ground of good poetry was available in the tradition - when you absorbed the great tradition of mimesis first adumbrated in Aristotle's Poetics - an embodied representation of experience in the round - then you became authoritative and anonymous, all at once. Imaginative truth meets truth in general, in song. Blackmur owed a debt to Eliot but took it further & differently. The only ground is actual ground itself (see "Comedian as the Letter C" on this, or Mandelstam's Voronezh dirt poems). Here's Blackmur hypothetically on JG (or HG for that matter), from an essay on "The Shorter Poems of Thos. Hardy": "We look at a poem that has all the airs and makes all the noises of setting considerable matters in motion. Does it so? or is it merely about the business of searching for a subject to use the airs and noises on? Id the latter, does it after all succeed, by divine accident, in catching the subject by the throat or tail? or is it windmill fighting - a whirling, a whirring, and all gone? Certainly the fine lines and passages that vein bad poetry are come at - written and read - somewhat that way; and we need not value them less for that - though we need not value more the slag in which they occur. The economical writ does not run in our experience of poetry, as any library or the best anthology will show. We put up with what we get, no matter what the expense and wastage, in order to use what little we can discover. "Discovery is judgement, and the best judgement is bound to falter, either allowing the poem too little through a deficiency of good will, or ACCEPTING AS PERFORMANCE WHAT WAS ONLY EXPECTED THROUGH UNDISCRIMINATED SLOTH [my caps], or on both sides at once by overlooking the poem's stretches of plain good writing - writing that, as Marianne Moore says, 'cats and dogs can read.'......Anonymity is the sign of the objective achieved at the blessed expense of the personal, whether in the poet or the reader, and is just what to look for when the bother is done." - RP Blackmur