In the middle of the ongo­ing feud over here, Kent John­son quoted this com­ment by Ange Mlinko,

Too bad the out­side doesn’t exist today.

and suggested:

Now *there’s* a propo­si­tion upon which to base a soci­ol­ogy of con­tem­po­rary poetry!

That’s true enough, but if you were inter­ested in, say, the his­tory of the United States in the 20th (and 19th, and 18th, and 21st) cen­tury, you might want to set your neu­rons ping­ing against this com­ment, by Regi­nald Shepherd:

But ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences among poets are not (repeat, not) as impor­tant as real (no quotes) dif­fer­ences like race and poverty.

I cite this not because I agree with Shepherd—I don’t—but to sug­gest it as a kind of his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal litmus test, for the par­tic­u­lar way in which a person chose to dis­agree with Shepherd’s com­ment would say a lot about how that person thinks about this country’s his­tory in general.

Of course, it’s always pos­si­ble that some­one will come along and write a his­tory of this coun­try in the anti-​historicist mode rec­om­mended by Fou­cault, a his­tory that refuses to accept the given­ness of uni­ver­sals. But until that time, the five prim­i­tives invoked by Shepherd—race, class, ide­ol­ogy, the real, and poetry—are likely to remain the most basic ele­ments of our his­tor­i­cal thinking.