As my own hobby-horse has hoved into view, I'll stop.
Roger
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> As I have said previously, my current view is that there is a line of
> influence going from Picasso and Cezanne to Apollinaire and hence to
> Pound. A cross-pollination, perhaps? In my view, Pound becomes part
> of the ferment of thought in the "early" days of modernism. My view is
> probably unconventional.
>
> I would argue away from the "disintegration of the self" to a "view of
> the disintegrated self and the world." In this trope, the self - and
> it's world-view - has always been fragmentary; it was only kept
> together by an act of will or lack of knowledge. Once the belief in a
> unitary view of the 'verse (or self) has been shattered, the 'verse
> (or self) becomes chaotic, fragmentary. We then build up our sense of
> subject by aggregation and accumulation.
>
> In line with your breaking of tradition, there is also Pound's
> "breaking the pentameter" - interestingly, something that's not come
> up so far, although Kasper essays towards it with "make it new". In
> other words, Pound starts a new line of poetry, breaking off from the
> line of descent from Shakespeare. A revolutionary step. Of course, I
> would rather the person who did this was more aligned with my sense of
> the political but hey, Shakespeare's politics (as far as we can
> discern them) weren't exactly of the socialist peace-loving kind
> either ... although we can comfort ourselves with our lack of
> knowledge on Shakespeare's politics. I wonder if we knew nothing about
> EP's politics would our view be different?
>
> Roger
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 4:41 PM, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > The real poetic revolution effected by Pound and Eliot, or at least by
> > the Pound of the Cantos and the Eliot of The Waste Land, who are the
> > Pound and Eliot who count, was an outgrowth of imagism -- an
> > outgrowth, because imagism in the strict sense was a movement of minor
> > importance. But imagism's fundamental technical innovation turned
> > into something that changed the nature of poetry. In previous poetry,
> > the image had been a vehicle: the individual image was inhabited by
> > the thought and feeling of a poetic self. Pound and Eliot's imagism
> > insisted that the image should be as vivid and precise as possible a
> > verbal representation of a sense-impression, *and nothing else.*
> > Consider a random passage from Keats:
> >
> > Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
> > Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
> > Conspiring with him how to load and bless
> > With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
> > To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
> > And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
> > To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
> > With a sweet kernel ...
> >
> > Each image in these lines is a judgment, from which we can derive the
> > emotional, and even, by implication, the intellectual and moral, state
> > of the persona contemplating it. Now take almost anything from
> > Pound's Cantos:
> >
> > Betuene April and Merche
> > with sap new in the bough
> > With plum flowers above them
> > with almond on the black bough
> > With jasmine and olive leaf,
> > To the beat of the measure
> > From star up to the half-dark
> > From half-dark to half-dark ...
> >
> > We don't know how the speaker of these lines *feels* since there's no
> > speaker to inhabit them; the minutely-described sense impressions have
> > no content but themselves. And the occasional more traditionally
> > discursive passages in the Cantos in which a speaker inhabits the
> > imagery, are usually either translations, such as "A Lady asks me ..."
> > as if the poet were making a point of saying, "This is a mask, the
> > personality inherent in these lines is not me," or political rants,
> > which are the least successful passages of the poem since it's always
> > a fatal error for a poet to put on his own mask.
> >
> > Pound and Eliot seemed to be trying to make images expressive not by
> > using them as vehicles for thought and feeling as previous poets did,
> > primarily through metaphor, but by arranging them as units in a
> > mosaic, to express -- what? Ultimately, nothing. Or rather, no one.
> >
> > And hence the inadvertant modernist revolution. The failure of the
> > collocated sense images to cohere into an identity for whom the mosaic
> > had a meaning beyond itself was a successful poetic reflection of the
> > failure of modern human beings to create an identity. Despite their
> > aesthetics and technique, rather than because of them, Pound and Eliot
> > blundered into a poetic method which could create a recognizable
> > mimesis of the disintegration of the self, which was the most
> > important that was happening in their world, and in ours.
> >
> > --
> > ===================================
> >
> > Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
> >
> > ===================================
> >
>
>
>
> --
> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> "She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
> She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
> The Go-Betweens
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
The Go-Betweens
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