The Conclusion of the Conclusion which means I am officially done, except for some pesky translations:

Note that Bernstein?s disdain is not for popular culture, which can be smart and edgy in its own right, but for the seemingly well-intentioned middle-brow dilution of high-culture. He suggests that we should be suspicious of the impulse to "popularize" poetry in a way that would eliminate all those elements that make it distinctive and valuable.

The Spanish situation is not identical to that in the North-American one to which Bernstein is referring. Official culture in Spain, heavily supported by the State, is devoted largely to the nostalgic commemoration of an idealized past. Nevertheless, there is some strong parallels between García Montero's "poetry of experience" and contemporary American poetry of the Billy Collins school. Most significantly, both movements succesfully position themselves at the center or mainstream of the cultural landscape and reject more avant-garde, intellectually challenging poetics. Both have profited from the erosion of the boundary between the "high" and the "middle." It is necessary to remark here that the concept of the "middle-brow" has itself undergone a shift downward: the on-line magazine Slate, for example, runs a column entitled the ?middlebrow? which has recently addressed such weighty issues as the Sports Illustrated Swim-Suit Issue, The ?Gillette Man,? the humor of Dave Barry, and quality of coffee at Dunkin Donuts. If this is the middle-brow, where has popular culture gone? Or more relevantly, does this re-definition of the term mean that anything of more intellectual weight than Dunkin Donuts is high-brow?

It is difficult to avoid the appearance of elitism when insisting that there is a significant difference between John Ashbery and Billy Collins, or between Antonio Gamoneda and Luis García Montero. Even if we accord Collins and García Montero their due, however, almost anyone would agree that their poetics is founded on an explicit rejection of the more challenging role that readers like Bernstein or myself expect from poetry. The "anti-elitist brief against difficult late modernist and postmodernist poetry fails, in my view, because it is based on a misguided defense of popular culture. Those of us who champion more challenging poetry enjoy Dave Barry and Dunkin Donuts, Comic Books and HBO serials, as much as anyone else does. The objection is not to popular taste, but to the relentless promotion of a sort of middle-brow culture of blandness.

Another familiar assumption that must be rebutted is that the assault on high culture is somehow progressive. It is true that conservative pundits inside and outside of academia sometimes use the idea of a traditional literary canon in order to promote their agenda, but does anybody believe that the study of literature helps to prop up the power of the Bush administration? If ever the political élite required the sort of legitimization provided by literary scholars, those days are long past. By the same token, the demand that literary scholarship be politically efficacious in an immediate sense is perhaps unrealistic. Even more socially relevant work has inherent limitations when it is confined to the practice of an academic discipline.

It is true that I have myself made a political statement of sorts in this book, since I have insisted on the congruence between middle-brow poetic blandness and reactionary thought, and argued that the state sponsorship of mediocrity is not beneficial to culture. My aim, however, is not to change the world but to preserve a space in it for the vibrant poetic culture that has been the mainstay of my life.