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OK Jeffrey, but I am still having trouble with this. I don't think all mainstream poets see what they do as being merely acts of self expression etc., though waffle about self expression plays a big part in their literary propaganda - it is often patronising too, within the workshop culture, treating self expression as something worthy enough for the amateurs while the 'real' poets are those engaged with the noble art of of continuing English literature. Sorry, but I can be very cynical about this stuff. But on the other side of things neither do I see the existence of purely 'theory-led poets' - nobody I know is like that. Yes, as I said in a post to Robert Hampson, I do think there are poets whose work contains a more direct link between theory and practice, and I called that 'too abrupt, too brittle', or something similar. But as Robert H. pointed out, this is part of a dialectic between the two, and I have to agree with him on this. My interest in all this is down to the fact that, as you know, I have been critical of some of the directions avant and innovative work has gone - but for me a supposed over reliance on theory would only be part of the picture - what matters is what attitude the poet has to theory, the context in which they find out about it, the life circumstances in which they use it - as I said before, whether they are energised by it or dulled by it, made to question things by it or made to conform to things by it. My take on this is that there has been an increasing tendency towards the negative aspects of this, and the only reasons I can find are those related to institutionalization within academia. But I am the first to admit that this is relative. Tim On 1 Sep 2010, at 13:42, Jeffrey Side wrote: > I agree with what you say, Tim. It just seems me that the mainstream > see what they are doing (at the point of doing it) as merely acts of > self-expression, devoid of theoretical impulses. Yes, as you say, > any theoretical aspect has become long naturalised, and this > shouldn’t be overlooked in literary criticism of mainstream poetry. > But compared with the more methodological approaches of theory-led > poets, mainstream approaches (which I see as often intuitive) can’t > practically be called theoretical, despite the theory underlying it, > as that theory has become naturalised. Whereas, the un-naturalised > theories of theory-led poets do consciously inform their work—that’s > the point of their doing it--to let people know they are doing it.