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This is confusing two different strands of atgument, I think. I was pointing out to Dave the relevance of Williams in the US in the simplest possible terms. But what I've been talking about at some length isn't a question of discipleship, but of dialogue. I'm in dialogue with Marvell, not with Eliot, and I think many are actively in dialogue with Hopkins--he still matters, in that sense, to poets. As to other media, I can't speak for painters, but I assume my relationship to Rothko is different than theirs--he matters differently for me. A musical analogy. The Wagner-Brahms war, in which everyone took sides, is long over. The composers I know like Brahms, but they tell me he's irrelevant to their practice. Wagner is apparently still relevant. So it's a question of usefulness, as in, I go to this or that artist to learn, but also usefulness as audience and colleague--I'm speaking to them. My sense is that artists tend to value earlier artists who are part of their internal audience--that when a poet says he loves this or that other poet's work what he means is that he finds it useful in this way. We're simply in a different relationship to Eliot, or Chaucer, or the Gilgamesh epic than non-poets are. Not particularly unusual. I have a cabinet-maker friend. His appreciation of a piece of carpentry is vastly different from mine. I learn from his eye, see more than I once did, but it's still not the same. Even if I did an apprentice-piece it would remain different--my friend has been through the refinement of his awareness through thirty years of practicing and improving his craft. When he looks at a nicely-made piece he not only dopes out how it was made, but feels the process. As to your little red herring, I presume you're aware that sex is more fun with some than with others. It's better, in my experience, when it's in dialogue. Mark At 12:52 AM 3/29/2006, you wrote: >On 29/3/06 12:18 PM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > Eliot has few children in America and has become something of an > > artifact of the past, even among those who love the poems. Williams > > fathered tribes and remains contemporary for many. > >Seminal indeed (though I do hear Eliotic cadences in Ashbery, rightly or >not, and poetic genealogies are much harder to trace than biological ones). >But Mark, I can't help thinking this is somewhat like the Catholic attitude >to sex: it's legitimate only if for procreational purposes. What of the >beautiful lovemaking that goes on for its own sake, unthinking of progeny? >How many people have successfully followed Hopkins? Is Rothko any less a >great painter for being a dead end? > >All best > >A > >Alison Croggon > >Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com >Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au >Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com