How do you learn from the masters
Without envy or intimidation

The postmoderns those decentered subjects
Writing insideoutside a free play of free play
Metanarrative of metafiction
Leveling pastiche
Archeology anatomy and bricolage
All under erasure there is no all
Breaking the silence with aporia
Authors writing the death of the author
Drowning in the intertext

The modernists had a beginning
In the shadow of the arcade
The shadow of the engine
Humanity alienated in alien nature
Humanity the subject of forces beyond itself
The relentless dialectic of history
The battleground of unconscious drives
The source of the surreal frisson
Nature which speaks but only in confuses paroles
The familiar regard the fields of gazing grain
A tiny planet and homo the offspring of beasts
And yet the mighty individual
Large and containing multitudes
Hearing always the song of mother death

But the romantics loved best
The great and suffering soul
Storm stress and elusive tranquility
The hero of the egotistical sublime
Ambitious Faust leading the army of the damned
At the pinnacle the only move is downward
And now more than ever seems it rich to die

For the neo-classicals a game of rules
With victory to the ne’er so well expressed
Deploying the armamentarium
Of zeugma
Of chiasmus
Neatly evading the slow hypermetrical snake
And the false wit of paronomasia
But there can be but one best
And dunces all the rest
And universal darkness buries all

The renaissance loved workmanship
Or often the work of nameless woman
The lacemaker
The applicant of jewels and cloth-of-gold
Or the achievement of self-driven gay rebel
Sagacious Leonardo smooth-muscled Michelangelo
Or the uncontrolled contriver of Tamburlaine
Finally to lapse into despair
Telling the tale told by an idiot
Falling with Satan to justify the ways of God

As for the ancients nobody is ever first
There is no avenue of escape
Discovering with Thales our watery birth
With Aeschylus the grip of fate
With Socrates the dilemma of Euthyphro
The sway of tyrant and triumvirate
Of knowing but forgetting
That we know that we know that we know
That which we always knew

And so we revert to the foul rag and bone shop
But witness Yeats’s perfect diction
Not vile or soiled
But perfectly foul