The novísimos were a group of poets inspired by a lot of things "in the air" in the late 60s and early. The neo-avant-garde of the Italian novíssimi, from which the name was taken, the breaking down of barriers between high and low culture, the Parisian May of 68; the poststructuralism of Barthes and Foucault. All these things, taken together, have a convenient name: postmodernism. The argument that these poets were historically anomalous, that somehow what they were doing is out of sequence, anachronistic, is ridiculous prima facie.

What happens to this postmodernism, however, is very revealing. On the one hand, it is attacked (by those making the anachronism argument), in the 1980s and 1990s. It's an embarrassment to have even have had a postmodernism, apparently!

At the same time, in some sense it becomes folded back into a more mainstream high/ late modernism, with highly uneven results. One of the first things to go by the wayside is the interest in pop culture--precisely the element that made these poets seem more postmodernist than modernist. In retrospect this interest seems merely epidermal, in the case of many poets. The (apparent) suspicion of high culture gives way, in many cases, to a rather unproblematic celebration of the same.

Some poets just repeat themselves in book after book, hardly varying their position and writing worse and worse. This is a kind of fossilized late modernism. I won't mention any names.

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Aesthetics functions as a kind of radar. The late modernist aesthetic is stringent. Since it doesn't admit other alibis, commercial or political, it pretty much stands or falls by quality. Of course, you will tell me that quality is a subjective determination, a mere value judgment. Yet somehow these value judgments won't go away. The main arguments against modernism (and experimental variants of postmodernism) are

(1) Commercial. It responds to no economic demand. (Note that this is, typically, the objection, not just to modernist poetry, but to poetry itself, and to all but the most commercial forms of literature.)

(2) Political. Modernism does not promote the correct social causes, or does not espouse them efficiently or efficaciously, and may even espouse some incorrect ones.

(3) Social. Modernism is "elitist" in its forms.

Usually (1) or (2) is combined with (3). Note, however, that a 4th kind of objection, aesthetic, is rarely made (any more). You are not going to fight modernism on its own terrain because you will lose. So the argument for quality is almost tautological. If I say Zukofksy and you way Woolf, we are really in agreement. In other words, we don't have to agree about the exact works or authors that our individual subjective taste leads us to in either case. On any given day I might prefer Arlen to Porter, or Gershwin to Rogers.