Well, it's unending because people get so confused, Jon. And far too
many end p discussing only what they perceive t be 'meaning' or
something, which ends up being content -- because they're dis-content?
I agree that the dichotomy form/content does nothing except start
arguments unending(ly).
I like your take on style/form, although I suspect it might start as
many arguments once we try to get down to details, especially as to
who works the beat best. On the other hand, perhaps I have learned so
much from Pound only at what you're calling the style level, in the
micro-, not the macro-cosm of his work; not sure about that. What
bothers me is that limiting, I think, factor 'plot' which you
introduced.
Alison is right, it's so much easier to get away from teh problem in
music or visual art....
We're domed to work with words....
Doug
On 8-Apr-09, at 5:18 PM, Jon Corelis wrote:
> Two comments orthogonal to how this unending aesthetic dispute is
> usually considered:
>
> 1) The argument about the relationship between poetic form and
> content assumes that a poem is an utterance, that is, essentially an
> utterance and not some other sort of thing which uses utterance.
> Today this means a text. A text consists of what is being said, which
> is its content, and how it is being said, which is its form.
> Aristotle, however, conceived of a poem not as an utterance but as an
> action. From this viewpoint, the distinction between form and content
> disappears: the poem's action is not a linguistic one but a mental
> and emotional enactment (existing at the boundary of the conscious and
> unconscious, though A. couldn't have put it that way) which is
> expressed by utterance. Talking about the content of a poem makes as
> little sense as talking about the content of a religious ritual. Or
> to put it another way, it's like trying to separate the dancer from
> the dance.
>
> 2) Which brings us designedly to Yeats, who in a famous passage in
> his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Poetry said that Pound
> had more style than anyone, but more style than form. Yeats seems to
> be talking about a different fundamental dichotomy than form and
> content: what could the relationship between form and style be? I
> think the clue might be to consider the issue in visual arts. Take a
> drawing: the way the lines look is the style, and the way the picture
> looks is the form. (This suggests why Pound's verse is so impressive
> examined through a magnifying glass and so frustrating viewed at arm's
> length.) In poetry, form would be what the poem does (its enactment
> or Aristotelian plot) and style would be how it communicates what it
> does -- a distinction which seems to me more useful to contemplate
> than the posthumously abused equine of form/content.
>
> --
> ===============================================
>
> Jon Corelis http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
>
> ===============================================
>
Douglas Barbour
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