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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 ===============================================