In his Introduction to the Penguin Classics 2008 edition of Villa's Collected Poems, Luis Francia makes the following observation: "Taken to task for his insistent desire to be regarded as "universal" – he was, after all, a creature of his age – wherein "universal" was synonymous with the Western tradition, still [Villa] felt no obligation to display in his art overt signs of his situation in the world, believing that that was irrelevant and, moreover, lay in the province of prose."

Villa, born in the Philippines in 1908, emigrated to the United States in 1930 and thereafter returned to the Philippines for only brief visits, declining lectureships and a government pension in favor of his small apartment in Greenwich Village. Although he was throughout his life highly regarded in the Philippines as one of the founding fathers of Filipino American literature and in 1972 designated by the Marcos government as "National Artist of the Philippines," he was and is widely criticized by Asian American scholars as not being "ethnic" enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Garcia_Villa It has been asserted that: "It is Villa's very allegiance to the universalizing aesthetic dicta of high modernism and the Anglo-American literary cannon that has prevented him, up to now, from being considered under the rubric of American ethnic writing." Timothy Yu, Asian American Modernisms: José Garcia Villa's Transnational Poetics. http://www.meritagepress.com/yu.htm To the extent that this was intended as criticism of Villa, it misses the point. 

Villa was insistent that he wanted to stake his reputation on his place in the Anglo-American tradition of high modernism and did not want to place himself in the realm of being simply a Filipino ethnic poet. He resisted all entreaties that would have placed him in the latter realm, such as offers of positions in the Philippines, offers to purchase his literary papers so that they could be returned for display in the Philippines, and offers to be buried in the Philippines where he had been born. This had nothing to do with lack of gratitude for the honors afforded to him by Asian American scholars during his lifetime, but with fundamental principles of his theory of poetry, namely, that poems should not be "about anything," that tying poems to ethnic politics or any other concrete subject matter violated the principle that "If you can say it in prose, don't write it as poetry," that "self constraint and impersonalization . . . make for more durable art," and that "what makes poetry a visionary labor [is that] it dissolves the particular into the general and universal."

 I was reminded of the foregoing when I read the obituary in The New York Times of March 29, 2012 of Adrienne Rich, in which she was described as "a poet of unswerving vision at the forefront of feminism," and a follow-up article the next day by David Orr, who writes a column on poetry for The Times Book Review, which speaks of "the defiant political stands for which she became famous." As I find typical of Orr's writings, he frequently raises the right question –in this case: "How do we read her work not as social history, but as poetry?" – and then fails to provide an answer that makes any sense.