When it comes to things like poetry I don’t see how it is possible to mention “the academy” as if it were any kind of substantive unity. (It may be different for biochemistry, I don’t know.). I can think of some English departments I consider very positively engaged with contemporary poetry, Sheffield for instance, and others completely beside the point. You pays your money and you gets what you gets. Creative writing is,, I suppose, mainly responsible for the disarray whereby different classes even on the same campus will teach violently opposed versions of poetry, and you can get a Ph.D. without having learning (in the old sense), since it is a basically unacademic subject. 

(b) For the record, it was half-seriously proposed around 1968 in Cambridge that we (whoever we were) should abandon even the minimal publication we had (TEI) and proceed by the circulation of manuscripts (typescripts) in the Elizabethan manner. which I think was out of an anti-commercialism taken over from Pound and Olson. It proposed that by being written the text was *already* public and the difference it made to beyond lay not in its own remit but with the context itself, or history. And yes, it proposed a very heavy elitism. But however proudly she defied it, non-publication was a smarting wound to Emily Dickinson, as it was to Hopkins.

I always liked the kind of proceedings under which someone like Wyatt worked, that poems were circulated with or without author’s name attached and the recipient copied them into a personal manuscript collection. And while you were doing  this, if you saw anything you didn’t like you changed it. I think this would be particularly good for translated poetry.

PR