I'm all for reading the poets of past cultural periods with great respect for the universal truths and all, but that doesn't really solve anything, does it? I'd still have to know what this reading would look like more specifically. Pound reading Calvacanti or Arnaut Daniel, Heidegger reading Heraclitus, Rothenberg reading the Torah, Gould reading Mandelstam, Spicer reading Yeats, Duncan reading H.D., Celan reading Dickinson, Magee reading Angie D... There seem to be infinite possibilities, each with its own particular (non-universalistic) agenda. Assuming we're all after the same universals (a big assumption by the way) the roads to getting there seem infinite. The choice of a filiation in the present and immediate past has to do with how this tradition is defined. The metaphor of progress is a dumb one, I agree--dumb because it doesn't tell us what we need to know.