Ian, you are making perfect sense. I think that you’re really on to something in your point #2. I hadn’t considered Seidel’s persona as a rebuke to the Death of the Author, but it makes plenty of sense to do so.
I must admit that I’ve never thought of Seidel as a particularly postmodern poet: his rhythms and straight-forward declarative sentences seem different from the fragmentation and slipperiness of Ashbery or Armantrout, and his concerns seem to lie outside how much language can convey or the fragmentation of identity that fascinate the postmoderns. Instead, I see him responding to the themes and techniques of Eliot or middle Lowell. That said, you may very well have a better feel for his work than I do.
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