Ric,
Erudition isn't the issue. My point has to do with my perception of the
EXECUTION of a particular mode of the poetics of allusion in Mottram's work.
You'll know the passage in Bunting where he speaks of these matters with
reference to his own work and Pound's. Lots of ways knowledge etc. might
enter into poems: catastrophe theory, for instance, does not exactly enter
Allen F's _Gravity_ series via allusion. AT TIMES, and IN PLACES, the mode of
allusion in EM's work seems TO ME tired, already played, a showing of
credentials rather than outward and exploratory. Citation. Can produce the
effect of E. D. Hirsch--AT TIMES. And the mode is pretty well-played by the
time EM comes to it. So, again, it's not erudition, it's not (as I told
Lawrence privately) a matter of doing the work--as a one-time Pound scholar
I've been down Del Mar avenue and up to Grosseteste place and so on--but of
considering the success of a particular mode. I leave aside the matter of
idiom, cadence, and ear etc. And of course the essays and the force of the
man's work generally on the scene, for which I have lots of praise.
We should all have such passionate defenders as Eric Mottram has.
In haste, and all best,
Keith
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