Alan Swallow brought out J. V. Cunningham's Tradition and Poetic Structure. JVC says that he attempted in this book to be "cold-blooded," but it's never quite clear why. Perhaps because, as we'll see in a moment, he didn't want to be perceived as belonging to the club of people who put poetry in general on a pedastal. Anyway, he implies that cold-bloodedness is an attitude opposite of that felt by others who "practiced...the highest and easier art of literary criticism." So we are to suppose that this analysis not itself a form of literary criticism. (Then what is it?)It's possible that the term "cold-blooded" was a nod, or bow, to Cunningham's teacher-mentor, Yvor Winters, who had successfully raised cold-blooded poetry criticism to a new level. (By the way, Cunningham never formally studied with Winters, although he did spent some 15 years at Stanford, soaking in the master's contrarian blend of modernism and anti-modernism.)
In "Poetry, Structure and Tradition," he attempts to define poetry--no easy matter, for in this case "the object of definition is not constant."
The difficulty of definition "springs from the need to defend and praise poetry." "It is felt that one has not only to define poetry but also in so doing to put it in a place of honor." Yet, he contends, such claims for poetry "have in fact weakened it." On one hand poetry's puffers have "erected pretensions that no linguistic construction, no poem, could ever hope to satisfy."
Among such pretensions (and now we're really getting to it - to, for one thing, the connotation of the word "tradition" in the book's title) is that poets can lead the life of the nation. Silly for poets or poets' "nice" commenders to pretend that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world--"and a good thing it is that they aren't." This political pretension has "limited," he believes, the kind of poetry that can be written.
So moving away from the poet's power to say something for and to the polity is a move toward, not a retreat from, poetry's capaciousness. And from here making a definition is apparently a simple matter. "Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition."
So there you have it.
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.
