This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.Read More