The dominance of the poetic ideology conceived by Eliot and justified by his existence expired with the master and his caste, but that hardly meant the major offices of poetry themselves shut down; just that they were filled up differently. Both in society at large and in the academy, the America of the late Cold War (1968-1989) was marked less by a shift in structure than in personnel: the narrow, wasted WASP males withered and the male and female whites, broadly defined, took their places. Of the three major critics who emerged in the period, white academics all, none were Protestant or English in descent: Bloom (born 1930) was male and Jewish, Perloff (born 1931) female and Jewish, Vendler (born 1933) female and Irish Catholic. Though trained by New Critics and adept in their techniques, they each inclined, in very different ways, towards some version of romantic aesthetics, a predilection which, as their teachers died off, they themselves gained tenure and stature, and puritan mores relaxed, they saw increasingly less need to mask: despite their disparate orientations, each had little difficulty recognizing John Ashbery, an incurable romantic almost totally incomprehensible to New Critical modes of taste, as a major poet.
Ashbery is fun to talk about. His almost casual emergence in the period is worth exploring, the readings and misreadings of him are legion, but for this essay's purposes we'll have to pinpoint one: he was a major poet temperamentally averse to being a Major Poet. Discretion was his natural element. There was something in the brightest spotlight that he dreaded like a poison: he was loathe to speak of poetry in anything like a definitive, let alone prescriptive, manner. Even while serving as the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard, Ashbery, called upon to deliver several Charles Eliot Norton lectures on poetry, fulfilled the task only by discussing in each lecture, with great insight and elegance, an ostensibly minor poet to his liking. He teaches two years at Cambridge and then heads back to Bard—one suspects he, laden already with every honor the establishment could offer, could have stayed on in Harvard as long as he had wished, but simply didn't wish to. A prince, one supposes, is freer than the King.
Thus American Poetry, a vestigially prestigious sector of an increasingly balkanized academy, society, and language, could call upon no native tongues (Ashbery being the only major, native, public poet of the period) to congratulate it for existing. This isn't quite as insignificant as it appears. Eliot was far from being mistaken when he insinuated that a certain kind of poetry helps power perpetuate itself. On this point, if on few else, his theory and practice were truly in accord: the beauties of Burnt Norton serve not just as a counterpoint to the wreckage of burnt London, but as an alibi for burnt Hamburg. The empires of the Anglosphere have never been content with mere material dominance. Might is never simply right for them: they cannot pride themselves upon their physical craft unless they envision that power as morally cleansing and rooted in moral supremacy. If a major poet was willing, as Tennyson and Eliot were, to play the Major Poet's part, their presence conferred a priceless, slight, ineffable aura of justice upon the shabby, gruesome criminalities on which all empires depend.
But they had to be willing to play the part. Lowell, the last indigenous holder of the office, had refused to stick to the approved script, and, following his deviance, was unrestrainable—once accorded, the title of the King proved incredibly difficult to rescind. Lowell's poetry frequently reflected and reflected on the American state, but never in a valedictory mode or manner: excruciating autopsies of its decaying ruling caste (Life Studies), hasty, uninformed, mistimed, and overwhelmingly disastrous foreign interventions (Imitations), elegy for a vanished Puritan ethos of public sacrifice and social justice (“For The Union Dead”), sterile, hopelessly unstable concentrations of brute force (History). Instead of offering consoling words to statesmen, he excoriated them; instead of condescending to the student radicals, he shared their outrage—and, at times, their manic incoherence. Rather than spineless elision, unsparing exposure: whatever his flaws, while regarding the State he was utterly fearless; he knew its operators were kin to him, and he despised them as only relatives can. When he died in 1977 he left his empire no less embarrassed than it deserved to be.