Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I echo everything good you have to say about John Nims. He was a lovely man. I am also a fellow admirer of R.S. Gwynn's poetry, and even had the good luck to meet Sam at a reading in Washington some years ago.
You are surely right that the romantic valuing of emotion over reason is a large part of the explanation, as well as the Romantic suspicion and distrust of techne or artifice. I think there is another problem that is more directly associated with modernism, and that is connected with Allen Tate's great admiration for Longinus, who, Tate believed, made a unique contribution to criticism by asserting that the effect and object of poetry was something other than persuasion, that its object was ekstasis, the transport which is achieved by elevation of style. As Tate and many moderns would have it, persuasion was the dirty work of rhetoric, while poetry had loftier, or, at least , independent ends. This contrast between the rhetorical and the poetic starts, maybe, with Arnold, and it reaches quite a crescendo in Yeats, who defined rhetoric as "the will trying to do the work of the imagination."
Although I think that Tate, for all his many virtues as a critic, deeply misunderstood Longinus and ancient rhetorical theory, his point of view is very close to being a modern orthodoxy. In short, I fear the prejudice against the kinds of poetry we are talking about is as deeply rooted in our modernism as in our romanticism. You may be right that the only way to overcome this prejudice is to write poems of such merit that they are undeniably objects of interest in their own right, but I'm afraid that editors who are unwittingly influenced both by romantic and modernist aesthetic notions are likely to apprehend those very merits as signs of a vitiating rhetorical element, one which they may privately admire in a rejection letter, but which they rarely publish. Of course, the prominence of people like you and this forum itself are hopeful signs. Thank you again for your contributions to these discussions!
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