The other day, Ron Silliman suggested that what the "School of Quietude" (as he dubs it) needs is someone who will "take on the responsibility for describing with much greater accuracy its mand sub-tendencies and internal points of contention."

Fair enough. But he later goes on to say that this "conservative tradition ... extends back not to Dickinson & Whitman, but to Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Sidney Lanier & their peers. One of the great questions for the School of Quietude is why does it let its history languish so?"

This is nonsense. The poets Silliman derides as quietists did not grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier. Among American predecessors, they read Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, as well as the same Modernist poets that Silliman presumably read. In fact, the Modernists themselves were the last generation of poets to grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier; the success of the Modernist overthrow of such poets was so great that both "the School of Quietude" and "the Post-Avant" (or as Bill Knott puts it, "the School of Noisiness") derive from the Modernists.

It's not completely persuasive to argue that there are two fundamentally opposed strains of work in contemporary American poetry; it is utterly ahistorical to project that opposition back onto the history of American poetry.