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From: "Jeffrey Side" <[log in to unmask]>
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Of course, I’m not claiming that The Waste Land and Finnegans Wake have not
been influential, just that nothing since has been as paradigm shifting in
poetry. Of course, I speak only of the current situation. I don’t rule out
the possibility of equally paradigm-shifting poetry occurring in the future.
>>
Ever since this came up, I've been trying to work out why I think think this
is not only just tired old bullshit, but just *why it is tired old bullshit.
(Bullshit repeated is still bullshit, however much you try to gild a turd.)
Let's start with The Waste Land.
How come, if this was so innovative and influential, Eliot shows no traces
in his later work of having written it, let alone learning from it? If you
draw a line from Prufrock to the Quartets, if the Waste Land wasn't there,
you wouldn't know it was missing. ("The Hollow Men" is the text that sits
between "Gerontion" and "Ash Wednesday".)
The two things innovatory about the Waste Land were jump-cuts and register
jumping. The first Eliot got from cinema and the second Ezra Pound does
ever so much better. (Think Canto 1, and onwards.)
Put The Waste Land beside the Pisan Cantos, and there's no contest, when it
comes to innovation or virtually anything else.
As to Finnegans Wake. Well, it's kinda interesting that the inheritor of
Joyce, Flann O'Brien, virtually ignores the Wake to concentrate on sending
up Ulysses.
(As to innovation, both _The Dalkey Archives_ and _The Third Policeman_ seem
to be carrying on some of the innovations that Joyce began with Ulysses, but
could as easily have been written had Finnegans Wake not existed.)
{Oh yeah, and there's the hat that Flann O'Brien wore when he was writing in
Irish Gaelic, not just in his journalism but in the original version of _The
Poor Mouth_. That ought to please Desmond.}
Enough from me for now.
R.
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