The real poetic revolution effected by Pound and Eliot, or at least by
the Pound of the Cantos and the Eliot of The Waste Land, who are the
Pound and Eliot who count, was an outgrowth of imagism -- an
outgrowth, because imagism in the strict sense was a movement of minor
importance. But imagism's fundamental technical innovation turned
into something that changed the nature of poetry. In previous poetry,
the image had been a vehicle: the individual image was inhabited by
the thought and feeling of a poetic self. Pound and Eliot's imagism
insisted that the image should be as vivid and precise as possible a
verbal representation of a sense-impression, *and nothing else.*
Consider a random passage from Keats:
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel ...
Each image in these lines is a judgment, from which we can derive the
emotional, and even, by implication, the intellectual and moral, state
of the persona contemplating it. Now take almost anything from
Pound's Cantos:
Betuene April and Merche
with sap new in the bough
With plum flowers above them
with almond on the black bough
With jasmine and olive leaf,
To the beat of the measure
From star up to the half-dark
From half-dark to half-dark ...
We don't know how the speaker of these lines *feels* since there's no
speaker to inhabit them; the minutely-described sense impressions have
no content but themselves. And the occasional more traditionally
discursive passages in the Cantos in which a speaker inhabits the
imagery, are usually either translations, such as "A Lady asks me ..."
as if the poet were making a point of saying, "This is a mask, the
personality inherent in these lines is not me," or political rants,
which are the least successful passages of the poem since it's always
a fatal error for a poet to put on his own mask.
Pound and Eliot seemed to be trying to make images expressive not by
using them as vehicles for thought and feeling as previous poets did,
primarily through metaphor, but by arranging them as units in a
mosaic, to express -- what? Ultimately, nothing. Or rather, no one.
And hence the inadvertant modernist revolution. The failure of the
collocated sense images to cohere into an identity for whom the mosaic
had a meaning beyond itself was a successful poetic reflection of the
failure of modern human beings to create an identity. Despite their
aesthetics and technique, rather than because of them, Pound and Eliot
blundered into a poetic method which could create a recognizable
mimesis of the disintegration of the self, which was the most
important that was happening in their world, and in ours.
--
===================================
Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
===================================
|