Bob and Robin,
Jump cuts and register jumping were done first by the Dadaists who
soon became the early surrealists. During the Dada period the main
source of both was newspapers and the example shown by the painters.
The influence of cinema regarding this, especially for the
surrealists, came slightly later. (A case can be made for even earlier
jump cutting etc, as always in these things, but the sharpness of the
cuts was unique to Dada.)
No matter what biography you read the influence of this activity on
Pound, who was in Paris at the time, is strangely sporadic. Pound was
a queer fish - his mind set and aims were not the same as the
Europeans around him. Eliot's 'innovations' were not innovations as
such, not within the broad revolutionary context, they were 'literary'
and relied very very heavily on his assimilation of Laforgue.
I get annoyed by this Anglo-American bias with regard to early
modernism.
Cheers
Tim A.
On 25 Apr 2010, at 01:28, Bob Grumman wrote:
>> The two things innovatory about the Waste Land were jump-cuts
> But the jump-cut is central to a huge amount of poetry now--Ashbery,
> for instance.
>
>> and register jumping. The first Eliot got from cinema
> He (with Pound's help) pioneered in its literary use. Doesn't
> matter where he got it. Darwin crossfertilized with geology--does
> that make him not innovative?
>
>
>> and the second Ezra Pound does ever so much better.
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