Exploding Relevance: From Image to Ideogram

Abstract

In Pound criticism, the relation between Pound’s Imagist and ideogrammic poetics has been much discussed. The consensus is, as Schneidau has observed, that Pound remained an Imagist throughout the writing of The Cantos, i.e. a poet for whom sharp details, and their cognitive effects on the reader, were a matter of fundamental importance (1969: 140).1 This chapter examines the pragmatic role of Pound’s use of the ideogrammic method of organizing disparate linguistic and cultural components in the context of the previous chapters. It discovers that Pound’s ideogrammic poetics radicalized the dialectical relation between the Imagist poet and his audience through its severe demands on inference. The method is based on Pound’s faith that poetry written on Imagist principles liberates the mind from a vulgar pragmatism: Imagist poetry is an event capable of transforming the consciousness of the audience, and thus acquires an important social function for Pound, who believed that formal structures would renew thought processes and induce new modes of thinking. I shall argue that although Pound intended the method to develop his earlier quasi-religious principle of reading (Chapter 2) and enhance the Imagist strategies to frustrate easy assumptions of relevance (Chapter 3) in view of his ambition to recruit an adequate readership for The Cantos, it demanded processing efforts commensurate neither with Pound’s Imagist principle of sudden liberation from mental inertia nor the cognitive benefits he anticipated. By showing how Pound’s assumptions about the ideogrammic use of language are supported not only by Imagist poetics but also by the authority of an empiricist theory of knowledge (and its transmission through formal structure), this chapter leads to a sharper understanding of his assumptions of relevance.KeywordsGrammatical SubjectCognitive EnvironmentImportant Social FunctionAdequate ReadershipCultural RenewalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.