Kasey Mohammad has posted a pretty convincing explanation of his comment, confusing to both me and Jonathan Mayhew on Paul Goodman's "On the Resignation of Justice Black." I don't quite buy it.
Part of my problem with the explanation is that the two senses of "elegance" Kasey tries to defend remind me of the beer can shim in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (search for "This old engine" in Part 1 to find the beginning of the story). In that context, seeing the formal properties of the beer can is truly elegant, while seeing a beer can is just wrong. I spend a lot of time with engineers, and I've spent a fair amount of time with scientists: for most of them, "elegance" is not separable from "beauty" and that beer can was in fact a beautiful solution. The "careless elegance" Kasey attributes to Goodman and O'Hara just doesn't exist—or, if it does, it exists only in the work of true technical masters like Auden. The former two poets wrote more than their share of very bad poetry because of their carelessness. And, by the way, by my lights Goodman is at least as valuable a poet as O'Hara. Adrienne Rich may be an unlikely supporter of that opinion.
On the side, I also object to Kasey's temporal exceptionalism ("a feeling that his [Wilbur's] gracefulness does not stand in the same position of relevance to his own era as Pope's did"), or at least to the direction he apparently takes it. The real distinguishing features of the last 100 years are not coarseness and brutality, but that despite two world wars and the godawful catastrophe of Marxism, a smaller percentage of people died by violence than in any previous time, people on the average lived longer than ever before (even in sub-Saharan Africa), world literacy rates rose higher than ever before, and women achieved unprecedented political freedom and power.
9:08:42 PM 
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