Bernstein 201: "After the Second War, there is a more conscious rejection of lingering positivist and romantic orientations toward, respectively, master systems and the poetic Spirit or Imagination as transcendent"
--an increased suspicion of "ideas [that] tend to impart to the poet a superhistorical or superhuman perspective"
such idea "diminish the partiality, and therefore particularity, of any poetic practice"
"Thus the emphasis in the New American Poetry and after on particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself"
more on 204-5: "The New American Poetry, by and large, rejected the grandiosity of scheme, of world-spirit, of progress, of avant-garde advance: the positivist, quasi-authoritarian assumptions of Futurism, Vorticism, or the tradition of Eliot. It rejected the heroic universalizing of poetic genius in favor of particularization, process, detail [...] Think of the role of the ungeneralizable particular in Creeley or Eigner as opposied to the controlling allegories of Pound or Eliot, think of Ashbery's or Spicer's or Mac Low's self-cancelation compared to Williams' relaxed prerogatives of self or Stein's exuberant hubris"