The vital issue of literary discipline at play in the morning panel moved to the center in the afternoon panel. Dante, more than anyone, shows how immediately the classical tradition comes to bear in great vernacular literature. We need everything before Dante, everything in his time, everything in our own time, to read his poem. Pinsky's translation becomes an open-ended metaphor for the kind of criticism probed and hinted at during this conference. As with poetry, criticism's central nature cannot be the property of any institution.
Criticism is an art rather than a positive or speculative science.
Like any art, it rejects nothing it finds useful for its own ends, not even positive or speculative science. Still, criticism must assume that literature is to be answered by literature, or at least by writing that challenges itself by standards of style and imagination generated by great writing, whether past or present. When this happens, as it did today in the extraordinary performances by Charles Berger and Eleanor Cooke, we see that the critic has no need to lean on jargon or preemptive appeals to extraliterary authorities. Berger and Cooke answered poems by doing in their own way what poems do, using ordinary words whose complications leave no room for phony manners. I take those performances as a major model for what can continue to happen at our conferences.