I believe in poetry determined by the language of which it is made. (Wiliams: 'Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be pecular to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.') I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption either as man or poet.... The poet, of all men, has least cause and least excuse to pervert his language, since what he markets is so little in demand.... I mean then words - as opposed to content. I care what the poem says, only as a poem - I am no longer interested in the exterior attitude to which the poem may well point, as sign-board. That concern I have found it best to settle elsewhere.... Only craft determines the morality of the poem.He is not saying he's not social or political; nor is he quite saying that his poetry doesn't have social or political resonances or concerns. He's saying that such concerns for him are better manifested and dealt with elsewhere (in forms of expression and activities of life exterior to poetry). He's saying that if the poems take ethical positions they do so only through the words and the very way the words are arranged, assembled, put in, left out. (This Cagean position is generally associated later with the "poethics" of Joan Retallack and others.)
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
