"I Pledge My Death Wattle to the Cause of Poetry"

Sunday's New York Times Book Review featured an essay by NBCC award-winning poetry critic David Orr, in which the laywer/poet/critic explores the idea of greatness in contemporary poetry.
An excerpt:
Poetry has justified itself historically by asserting that no matter how small its audience or dotty its practitioners, it remains the place one goes for the highest of High Art. As Byron put it in a loose translation of Horace: “But poesy between the best and worst / No medium knows; you must be last or first: / For middling poets’ miserable volumes, / Are damn’d alike by gods, and men, and columns.” Poetry needs greatness.
Or so the thinking goes, anyway. The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business.
Orr goes on to discuss poetry's perceived lack of ambition, the curious case of Elizabeth Bishop, the G.I. Bill, and, of course, John Ashbery (Harold Bloom: "since the death of Wallace Stevens in 1955, we have been in the Age of Ashbery.")
The essay has not stirred up the kind of storm William Logan's review of Frank O'Hara did a few months back, but it has caused some internet grumbling. A sample:

"What a strange turn, to discuss greatness, in relation to The Sounds that Wakes Me . . . But I think all the poets in MFA programs will looks up from their gin and begin to take notes."
-The Fray
"Perhaps Orr hasn’t read much recent Ashbery, but a line from “Phantoum,” in his A Worldly Country, strikes me as both cogent and hilarious here:
Grape and cherry were the flavors. Later they added mushroom.
We were grape children, trying to cope in a mushroom world. "
-Best American Poetry
"David Orr’s lament that it’s all over for the School of Q."
-Silliman
"We’ll take two extra-large diet Cokes, a family sized popcorn with extra butter, one package of peanut M&Ms and some gummy bears for the lady? Thanks."
-Vowel Movers
"As I see it, the great poets command a kind of cultural-artistic force field, a magnetic power - which intrudes upon and fuses with the history of their people in toto. With them, biography becomes fate. Suddenly events are no longer ruled by chance, but are transformed into a drama (of mind, art, originality). Reality is personalized through the medium of the work."
HG Poetics
"Ashbery is the last great American Poet of his generation, perhaps, but he isn’t the last great poet this country will ever have. Saying so, I think, falls into the fretting, hang wringing sub-Spenglerites who want to predict the death of various arts and institution–the novel, painting, theatre, whatever is old, venerated and in need of a bullet to the head."
1800 Blogger
"Based upon Orr’s description and his observation about a perceived lack of greatness or unique ambition in particular younger poets, some might suggest a pessimistic outlook for American poetry. However, just as I believe the profile of American poetry may have shifted in the last century from a focus on the greatness of individual figures to an additional and equally important glimpse at the greatness of a collective generation of contributors, I view the new model of American poetry in the future as one that will prove even more inclusive and democratic, concentrated not only in the powerful works of a few individuals, but also in the strength of the whole production of poetry by the nation’s poets."
--Edward Byrne
"this article feeds into nostalgia for that weird masculine initiation ritual that was the writer's workshop in its inception. And while we're talking about that "generation," where's the mention of Adrienne Rich? In her writing, she covers topics that certainly fit into even this article's narrowly-defined criteria for "great" poetry"
--De-Cidered
And we all know that Patton Oswalt is actually responding to Orr here, though he is much too polite to say so:

(Thanks, Fred)