great reading Jon, thanks. imagism touches me very closely & is
central to my poetic thinking. I'm going to write an essay & give a
presentation next week on Vorticism, which I need to read up on a hell
of a lot; I was thinking about comparing the effect of V. & imagism,
or how one possibly complemented the other. still open, but all
interesting.
thanks again
KS
On 07/04/2008, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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/
>
> ===================================
>
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