If the implied progressivism of Luke's idea that certain 'claims' in poetry become 'redundant' prompted some sermonising on my part, I can only say that it comes from a double hostility firstly to the idea that poems make 'claims' ( I suppose some do but I'd like to know how) and then also to the idea that the beliefs and forms embodied in poems become somehow redundant or invalid. Beauty as an example - an elusive and multifarious thing as Tim's poem suggests.
In the case of Pound he immersed himself early in Provencal poetry and later in Cavalcanti, among a vast constellation of others. The ideas that animate these poets are ones that I doubt many would subscribe to today - in Cavalcanti the 'spiriti' and 'spiritelli' have to do with Averroes's philosophy and medieval physiology which would certainly not figure large in contemporary medical practice. Perhaps just as well, although another earlier Arab physician Ibn Al-Haytham proposed a theory of optics that took Europeans some 6 hundred years to catch up with, with the work of Kepler on the function of the retina.
Anyway granted that we might not lend much credence to medieval cosmology or physiology, the way such ideas are present in poems might require on the part of the reader some openness and understanding rather than belief, and then the notion of redundancy becomes irrelevant.
Perhaps it makes more sense to speak of fashions within poetry. For the Romantics, for the most part, the enclosure of the rhymed couplet had become worn out and we see the re-emergence of ballad forms, the ode, ottava rima in Byron, Hebraic verse form in Blake, and so on. Which doesn't mean the couplet is dead as a form, Crabbe continues to use it in a quietly original way. He may not be a 'radical' but he's still a poet we might learn much from.
I guess what I'm saying is that poets such as Pound are using material from Italy to China, and from every age, to construct their poetics. Surely this is a virtue of his ABC of Reading - when I read it at 18 it gave me a daunting sense that to write poems I ought to learn as much as I could about the art through different cultures and languages and ages. There's some bluffing in the book, sure, and 'edicts' aplenty - Gertrude Stein sums up this annoying feature of Pound brilliantly: "A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village; if you were not, not" - but still it could profitably be recommended to anyone who wanted to write poems now. And would work against the tendency of US and now British Creative Writing courses to favour a tiny slice of modernity as the required reading.
Jamie
Sent from my iPad
> On 1 Sep 2017, at 00:51, Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Just to say that if we speak of Pound as a radical force we need to acknowledge that in him which is the complete opposite of radical. Not all poets stretch their inner contradictions to such extremes, but many do, and those who don’t tend not to issue edicts.
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> Personally I feel completely free to use the words truth and beauty, and to believe in them both as values. Otherwise I might as well play the kazoo for the rest of my life.
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> A good exercise is to flagrantly flaunt every command you can find: “A poem should not mean but be”, all of Pound’s how to write poetry stuff... Basil Bunting told us to be wary of adjectives. In his best known poem the first line has four words, two of which are adjectives. Lesson: poets (and others) including eminent poets, frequently speak through their hats.
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> Sorry if I sound acrid; I just got back from watching the vandalised version of Yerma. There are sometimes reasons for detesting modernity.
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> This place is a harbour of civilised consideration. I might say something before long.
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> PR
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