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My sons' pediatrician is keenly interested in temperament. Observing my chest-beating, bellowing, early-walker of a one-year-old this morning, he suggested a book that might help me negotiate the difference in temperament he perceived between mother and son. Little does he know the general consensus in the family is that this baby bull is a Mlinko. His placid father and brother look on in amusement as Mom wrangles with genetic payback.
I mention this -- the fact of temperament and its ability to mask itself, to go undercover, like that demur mother in the doctor's office -- because of an interesting exchange between two poetry blogs this week. Musing on the brilliant work of Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988), Jack Kimball i.d.'d the great American poet as eccentric by temperament. Gary Sullivan pointedly disagreed. He took the stock avant-garde position that art is social and that great art -- art that advances its genre -- is a group effort. He accused Kimball of perpetuating that old bourgeois-individualist cliche of the loner artist.

I'm simplifying a bit here because some of the terms they bat about (e.g. "folk" art) are superfluous. Essentially, it's an old standoff, but Jack's isn't an unnuanced position. Of course art is social; of course Ceravolo himself studied with Koch, was not writing in a vacuum, etc. But the poet has usually been an eccentric. From Whitman and Dickinson to Moore and Stevens to those poets in Other Traditions*, the point is not that these poets didn't edit magazines, have correspondences, or have their lives changed by an Armory Show. But they were already imbued with their own intractability. They could only become more deeply themselves as they aged.
So this is the stubborn fallacy of the avant-garde (apologies to Kenny). In their utopian zeal, they (like the computer science geeks I occasionally met in college seminars, awaiting the day we'd all get our brain chip implants) dismiss temperament as an epiphenomenon at best, an ideological construct at worst. Reason trumps temperament, or should. The "loner artist," on the one hand a capitalist plot to ensure we all stay in our cocoons, is simultaneously a capitalist dupe, resisting the deeper satisfactions of communal life.
God help those of us who just want to stay home and read a book! Sounding suspiciously like pastors of a flock ("No reading Seven Story Mountain in the back pew allowed"), the avant-garde wants you to know that if you aren't going to services (readings), who knows what other liberal vices you're hiding. Why, you probably vote too! In those little individual black-curtained booths!
* which isn't limited to American poets. See, for another example, Hopkins.