Title: From "His True Penelope Was Flaubert: Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Poetry"
Abstract: Pound's relations with nineteenth century have always been ambivalent, and this ambivalence can help us to situate with some precision alternatives available to him at crucial beginnings of his career. Such study will have incidental merit of bringing into contemporary attention vital work of Swinburne, Tennyson, Rossetti, and 'Nineties, which theories of poetry have submerged. It was, of course, in name of ordinary language that Pound rejected his earlier style-in name of Prose Tradition in Verse. An attempt to extract a consistent attitude from Pound's own writings in prose would be doomed to failure, and so we are left with practice to guide us, and first to be clarified seems to be whether break with worn-out rhetoric was as radical as Pound believed. Out of welter of claims and ideas, we can find some illumination from statement that Wordsworth was so intent on or plain word that he never thought of hunting for le mot juste (1) Just, of course, to what? An answer to that question takes us into causes disguised as reasons and vice versa: I should like to break up cliche, to disintegrate these magnetised groups that stand between reader of poetry and drive of it. For it is not until poetry lives again close to thing that it will be a vital part of contemporary life. The only way to escape from rhetoric is through beauty-beauty of thing, certainly, but besides that, beauty of ... We must have a simplicity and directness of utterance, which is different from simplicity and directness of daily speech. This difference, this dignity, cannot be conferred by florid adjectives or elaborate hyperbole; it must be conveyed by art, and by art of verse by something which exalts reader, making him feel that he is in contact with something arranged more finely than commonplace. (2) Now, what is this beauty of means if not rhetoric purged of its pejorative connotations? One kind of rhetoric is substituted for another, giving rise to a new set of justifications, but what is altered is relation of poetic to other kinds of language, and alteration comes for reasons given in the art of verse structure, reasons normally attributed to non-verbal world. The elaborate vorticist comparison of interaction of words with cones of steel that, when placed in relation, radiate sparks is equated with power of genius to perceive new relations-a pretty traditional idea-and this perception of relations is justified by beauty of means. As Pound says, poet who has been not too long ago born make very sure of this, that no one cares to hear, in strained iambics, that he feel sprightly in spring, is uncomfortable when his sexual desires are ungratified, and that he has read about human brotherhood in last year's magazines. (3) Well, let us call bluff And since it is nineteenth century with which we are dealing, our counterexamples had better come from there. When vain desire at last and vain regret Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain. What shall assuage unforgotten pain And teach unforgetful to forget? (4) Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell; (5) O let solid ground Not fail beneath my feet Before my life has found What some have found so sweet; (6) Go not, happy day. From shining fields, Go not, happy day. Till maiden yields. Rosy is West, (7) Let me ask grace; for I, Being loved, loved not again. Now springtime makes me love, And bids me satisfy The lover whose fierce pain I thought too lightly of: (8) If you loved me ever so little, I could bear bonds that gall, I could dream bonds were brittle; You do not love me at all. …
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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