The Surrealists were always clear about who was or was not qualified to enter their club room: André Breton decided. While notorious for pecksniffishness, at least he let you know where you stood in the broadly inclusive mansion of Modernism. Modernism's other rooms presented a mishmash of admissions committees, and Ezra Pound may have hit the nail on the head for much of their bickering when he remarked of Francois Villon (for him an early Modernist despite his fifteenth- century origins) that he never forgot “his fascinating, revolting self.”

The ticket to acceptance, in other words, may not have been Modernism's vaunted aesthetics of incompleteness and fragmentation mixed with history, but various types of self- loathing, or in Eliot's kinder phrase, a wish to escape the self, even if William Carlos Williams, Auden and Marianne Moore might merit exclusion on these grounds. They could be slipped in anyway, after all, along with Joyce and Cummings, if one followed Allen Tate's simpler requirement: some exhibition of “the remarkable self- consciousness of our age.” To be sure, any advanced forms of that self- consciousness induced a paradox of their own. They required, on the one hand, that the new poetry offer up excruciating self- doubts, and, on the other, that it revel in self- assertion— a hat trick of sorts, but one often leading to a style unencumbered by vanity, or one that paired the crucial emotional and ethical anarchy with classical coolness.

Some surrender to emotional anarchy, which was always part of the Modernist admission price, hinted at self- loathing in any case, or Villon's fascinating, revolting persona all over again, that of the social exile, or the criminal on the run expecting to be hanged. At a minimum, it meant untidiness, bleak humor and perhaps salvation by myth, religion or poetry regarded as a mystical activity: even the classical- Romantic Yeats could be admitted on these grounds, as might Rainer Maria Rilke.

What, however, about those few contemporary voices that still seemed not to fit in, those which nonetheless seemed part of an unaccountable, defiant avant- garde?