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I don't follow the Harriet blog and so could care less about its rules, but I can comment on Graves as you present it. His history is a bit off--seems more like pub blather. The phenomenon he talks about is in fact considerably more recent, postdating the first wave of modernism by several decades. The academics who became interested in the Eliot/Pound generation were in fact serious scholars, with traditional PhDs, tho a few of them also wrote poetry. It's with the proliferation of MFAs (Iowa was the only program for a very long time) that the academicization of the production of poetry happened. I think it's been disastrous, but it's not tied to modernism per se. For that matter, at most universities in the US modernism after the 30s is barely recognized as existing. I could probably count courses on Olson on the fingers of one hand, for instance. A question to ask might be why modernist verse, sometimes of extraordinary complexity, continues to be read in Latin America, and for that matter in mainland Europe, where there are no MFA programs and if poets teach it's because they're serious academics. The chasm between readers and poets seems to be largely an English language thing. In the US it's not just a matter of poetry, either--serious fiction gets published less and less by serious commercial publishers, and a press run of 5000 for a new novel seems munificent. Reading of all but self-help books and romances seems to have collapsed. Blaming all of this on academic Pound scholars seems a bit easy, not to say self-serving. >The thing which has struck me about American po-mo generally, in the last >few weeks, is the chasm in politico-aesthetic, between what's overtly stated >and what is actually done in the name of Poetry per se, by the predominatly >academic poets, is laughably and transparently, sad. > >Thomas Graves had been writing under the name Thomas Brady on the Harriet >blog, clarifying a position, that there has been a systematic alienation of >the casual reader from poetry in the last 100 years, due to the >academicizing of poetry, which began - according to Graves - "at the >beginning of the 20th century, with a coterie of friends who spread out into >institutions and supported one another in their minor ‘revolution of taste >which left the public behind in a triumph that was unfortunately humorless >and arrogant." > >Basically, this position argues that the academy went from a place where >poetry was studied, to the primary site of its productiomn. Lacking any >readers for their work, the 30's modernists took over the American academy >and artificially inflated their work there. So, you are a prof of English/CW >and you and your pals make false reps in the very classroom you eek out the >day job. > >This is the background Graves was facing when he first began propounding his >theory, that contemporary American poetry is run by coteries of subsidised >poets with an artificial audience of Creative Writing students: his general >thesis being that in the absence of any readers for their work, poets like >"Tate, Pound and Ransom bashed the mere professors of literary history and >the coup of the creative writing program was accomplished by Paul Engle >(whose Yale Younger had come from a Fugitive poet judge) and the >Modernist/Fugitive/New Critical army."