[New-Poetry] Il Miglior Fabbro

[Robin Hamilton]

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Robin,
re your last point, so what seems true is that Dickinson can only be thought of as the major poet of 19th Century for poets post-1955.
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Well, in a real sense, yes, in that before 1955, what we had were poems by "Emily Dickinson" rather than by Emily Dickinson.

As between 1550 and 1900, we didn't have the *authentic poems by Wyatt.

But there are more extreme cases -- not only wasn't John Donne a major poet (and sure, Coleridge and Browning sort-of noticed him) between 1650 and 1912 (actually 1923, with Eliot's review of Grierson's anthology) but he might as well not have existed during that time.

As to Blake ... well.  Took Yeats to pry him out of the woodwork in 1899.

And when I was at college in the sixties, Thomas Hardy was a novelist, but who reads Jude the Obscure today, other than as an adjunct to Thomas Hardy's Poetry?

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That has to leave Whitman in the catbird seat, where I'm sure he'd love to be, for the first half of the 20thC. (Along with melodious strains of Longfellow dying away against discordant modernist notes.)
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Whitman's admiration for the New York gutter journalist Mike Walsh (who described George Matsell as "300 lbs of blubber and malice") seems to me to reflect a failure of judgement that borders on the imbecilic.

IMHO.

And anyway, Blake did it better first.

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The other name among the Moderns that hasn't been touted is Williams.  Numerically far exceeding Pound's influence on later generations, I see Williams as being the American Modern who influenced the greatest number of poets.
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WCW, among the Big Four Modernists, is the one who doesn't really export.

It is, I think, something to do with the way his rhythms are (limitedly) rooted in the modalities of American speech.

Robin
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