Alison...point by point:
1) “Jeffrey, you're not talking about poetry, but about something else. The fact that modernism was later institutionalised has sweet fa to do with the work itself, which at the time it was made did not emerge from institutions. One can study the sociology of perception and status, and that can be quite interesting, but please don't think that says anything about actual poems.”
Alison, when I said,
“It isn’t as trivial as it seems. Whole poetic careers, sinecures, academic tenures, funding and grant availability etc. (if not institutions, e.g. Black Mountain etc) have been built on an assumed innovatory practice which has developed since Eliot et al."
I wasn’t using this as an argument from authority, which may have been the impression it gave you. I was questioning the “poetic innovation industry” that has grown out of Pound’s “make it new” edict. To this industry, the question of High Modernism’s importance, or not, is not a trivial matter, as Uche was suggesting it was.
2) “Also, it's nonsense to apply a film term to poetry and then to argue that this application says something about the chronology of poetry. I've seen film terms used to discuss a narrative poem by Catullus, although manifestly the Romans didn't have cinema. And Rimbaud made leaps in his work that could be called jump cuts, but might just be a mimesis of thought.”
Yes, but if one does this to argue that a later innovation was already present in the past, without making sure that the comparison is accurate, then it just leads to relativism. Saying, for instance, that Shakespeare used jump-cuts, when what you mean was he used quick scene changes just muddies the water.
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