Poem-Work Unfolding: Influences and Textual Results of William Carlos Williams’s Definition(s) of Poetics

Journal Article T. S. Eliot: Between Two Worlds. A Reading of T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays; Ezra Pound: An Introduction to the Poetry; Voices in the Whirlwind, and Other Essays; The Poetic Vision: Signposts and Landmarks in Poetry Get access T. S. Eliot: Between Two Worlds. A Reading of T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays. By David Ward. Routledge. £4·50.Ezra Pound: An Introduction to the Poetry. By Sister Bernetta Quinn. Columbia U.P. £4.Voices in the Whirlwind, and Other Essays. By Ezektel Mphahlele. Macmillan. £3·95.The Poetic Vision: Signposts and Landmarks in Poetry. By Robert Armstrong. Mitre Press. £1·50. Howard Sergeant Howard Sergeant Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 23, Issue 115, Spring 1974, Pages 40–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/23.115.40 Published: 01 March 1974

Reviewed by: The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination Nancy Worman Mark Payne. The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. ix + 164 pp. Cloth, $35. Mark Payne’s elegant and unusual book addresses an elusive topic: human perceptions of animal consciousness. Focusing largely on literary artists’ senses of other animals, Payne initially approaches the conundrum of how these artists devise ways to bridge this gap from a broad but distinctly personal perspective. He takes the reader with him out into a natural setting, complete with details such as the beers he drank in the evening and the driftwood on which he hung his clothes to swim, and puzzles over how we as humans make meaning from and with animals. Payne’s personally imbedded starting point grounds his insistence from the outset that we share certain aspects of our behaviors with animals and that we may even through particular experience countenance something of what might be called the animal perspective. To put it this way, however, somehow reduces the attentive grace with which Payne navigates such profound topics; while his concerns are essentially existential he is also after the delicate distinctions among phenomena that open out onto animal being, the diversities of which certain types of literary expression seek to capture. The book is divided into two sections of two chapters each, running from tropes and inhabitations of the “beast in pain” to articulations of human-animal experiences (embraced as “becoming something else”). Payne begins his exploration of how poets take account of animal lives by addressing their use of bestial otherness to capture abject and aggressive outsider experiences. As Payne demonstrates, the archaic poet Archilochus flashes his brilliant and disturbing poetic control of animal subjectivity as a means of antagonistic warning to his enemies and other iambic targets. Hipponax in contrast appears to offer up more fully inhabited images of the dog when he is down—that is, the scapegoat, the quintessential figure of abjection, the human reduced to animal status and rejected by the community of men. Hipponax is also the inventor of the iambic meter that famously “limped,” a deformity of rhythm that interested the modern American poet William Carlos Williams. In a wonderfully rich and responsive discussion, Payne shows how in his long (and last) poem, Patterson, Williams shapes his subjectivity as a “dog poet” by means of a similar inhabitation of the deformed or lowly animal, whose perspective is then celebrated as more attuned to the songs close to the ground: the sounds of the river’s run, the very local details attended [End Page 696] to by bug or snail. Here Payne claims that Williams’ “biopoetics” “keeps an ear open for the lameness of Hipponax’s choliamb in its efforts to communicate the experience of physical impediment by formal means” (48). He reveals the details of this formal engagement by tracking Williams’ use of triadic structures to capture human-animal incapacities and the vulnerabilities of imaginative work. The second discussion in this section takes on violent rejections of the continuities of human-animal experiences, which Payne likens to the myth of Satan because of the narcissistic hatred of other life forms that is central to its dynamics. This “destructivism” (a term Payne borrows from the American poet Susan Howe) originates in a sense of homelessness in the world and results in a groundless need to kill other animals, as well as in the fetishization of the artificial and inorganic. Payne’s poetic sources run from Milton to Flaubert, in whose descriptions of these lost killers he locates metonymies of this turn to artificiality. While there is something mildly disturbing in the apparently uncritical ways in which Payne represents this murderous perspective—so that, for instance, Symbolist aesthetics become consonant with its “biocide”—he captures effectively the dark fascination of this rejection of so much that is living. Against the human tendency to mass decimation of other life forms Payne sets the imagination’s attention to the “thisness” of individual things and beings. Gerard Manley Hopkins and, perhaps more surprisingly, Ezra Pound provide for Payne examples of modern poets who unfold...

“Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind — if the mind is strong enough”.1 This remark, which appeared in 1915, expresses an important aspect of Ezra Pound’s campaign to revolutionize English poetry in the early years of this century. Unfortunately, it is one of many remarks that are often cited but rarely given the kind of attention they deserve. Such statements reveal that Pound was a visionary poet who believed that elemental passions are lodged in imaginary objects which are directly observable. He claimed that these imaginary objects could be apprehended as clearly as any object available to the senses, and he attempted to render them as precisely as possible in his verse. This emphasis on the passions has been obscured by the traditional view of Modernism as a reaction against the emotional excesses of Romanticism and a reassertion of the Classical virtues of impersonality, objectivity, and detachment. But in Pound’s case as well as Eliot’s, impersonality and objectivity were designed not so much to suppress the emotions as to alter the way in which they are poetically expressed. For these seminal poets of the Modernist movement, our passions are originally revealed in the very things we see, and it is the task of art to present immediate experience in a way that awakens us to new or forgotten types of emotion.

In this revisionary study of Ezra Pound's poetics, Scott Hamilton exposes the extent of the modernist poet's debt to the French romantic and symbolist traditions. Whereas previous critics have focused on a single influence, Hamilton explores a broad spectrum of French poets, including Thophile Gautier, Tristan Corbire, Jules Laforgue, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Rgnier, Jules Romains, Laurent Tailhade, Paul Verlaine, and Stphane Mallarm. This exploration of Pound's canon demonstrates his logic in borrowing from the French tradition as well as a paradoxical circularity to his poetic development. Hamilton begins by explaining how Pound read Gautier's poetry as an example of Parnassianism and of the "satirical realism" of Flaubert and the modern novelistic tradition. He reveals, however, a crucial blind spot in Pound's poetic vision that facilitated his return to precisely those romantic and proto-symbolist elements in Gautier that were celebrated by Baudelaire and Mallarm, and that Pound, as a modern poet, felt obliged to repress. Arguing that Pound's response to symbolism was not specifically modernist, Hamilton shows how his dual attraction to the lyric and prose traditions, to symbolism and realism, and to the visionary and the historical helps us better to understand our own post-modern sensibility. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

<i>The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication</i>. Michael Kindellan. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xx+276.

The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me

At the beginning of 20th century, the imagists, consisting of a group of Anglo-American poets with Ezra Pound as the leading figure emerged. This group of poets posed an attack on every aspect of romanticism. This group encouraged the use of experimental form in poetry and promoting the 'verse libre' poetic technique they recognized the use of traditional form in Thomas Hardy's poem that break away from the 'sentimental optimism and nostalgia of Romantics and symbolist, giving the poems 'a modernistic clarity of vision' (Williams, 1946, p. 17). As the name suggest, the image become the central element in the imagist poetry. The main point of imagism itself centers on the 'image' itself, clearly stated by the poets' to recreate an otherwise inexpressible and unique experience of the insight" (William, 1946,p.18and Hughes, 1960,p.43) This essay discusses the role of poetic images in the works of early imagist poets. The discussion covers the analysis on the poems written by Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington and William Carlos Williams with the focus how the images function in the selected poems.At the beginning of 20th century, the imagists, consisting of a group of Anglo-American poets with Ezra Pound as the leading figure emerged. This group of poets posed an attack on every aspect of romanticism. This group encouraged the use of experimental form in poetry and promoting the 'verse libre' poetic technique they recognized the use of traditional form in Thomas Hardy's poem that break away from the 'sentimental optimism and nostalgia of Romantics and symbolist, giving the poems 'a modernistic clarity of vision' (Williams, 1946, p. 17). As the name suggest, the image become the central element in the imagist poetry. The main point of imagism itself centers on the 'image' itself, clearly stated by the poets' to recreate an otherwise inexpressible and unique experience of the insight" (William, 1946,p.18and Hughes, 1960,p.43) This essay discusses the role of poetic images in the works of early imagist poets. The discussion covers the analysis on the poems written by Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington and William Carlos Williams with the focus how the images function in the selected poems.

At the beginning of 20th century, the imagists, consisting of a group of Anglo-American poets with Ezra Pound as the leading figure emerged. This group of poets posed an attack on every aspect of romanticism. This group encouraged the use of experimental form in poetry and promoting the 'verse libre' poetic technique they recognized the use of traditional form in Thomas Hardy's poem that break away from the 'sentimental optimism and nostalgia of Romantics and symbolist, giving the poems 'a modernistic clarity of vision' (Williams, 1946, p. 17). As the name suggest, the image become the central element in the imagist poetry. The main point of imagism itself centers on the 'image' itself, clearly stated by the poets' to recreate an otherwise inexpressible and unique experience of the insight" (William, 1946,p.18and Hughes, 1960,p.43) This essay discusses the role of poetic images in the works of early imagist poets. The discussion covers the analysis on the poems written by Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington and William Carlos Williams with the focus how the images function in the selected poems.At the beginning of 20th century, the imagists, consisting of a group of Anglo-American poets with Ezra Pound as the leading figure emerged. This group of poets posed an attack on every aspect of romanticism. This group encouraged the use of experimental form in poetry and promoting the 'verse libre' poetic technique they recognized the use of traditional form in Thomas Hardy's poem that break away from the 'sentimental optimism and nostalgia of Romantics and symbolist, giving the poems 'a modernistic clarity of vision' (Williams, 1946, p. 17). As the name suggest, the image become the central element in the imagist poetry. The main point of imagism itself centers on the 'image' itself, clearly stated by the poets' to recreate an otherwise inexpressible and unique experience of the insight" (William, 1946,p.18and Hughes, 1960,p.43) This essay discusses the role of poetic images in the works of early imagist poets. The discussion covers the analysis on the poems written by Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington and William Carlos Williams with the focus how the images function in the selected poems.

Ezra Pound's acknowledgment of his debt to Browning, the only one of the major Victorian poets he admired, is usually understood to mean that he imitated the older poet's vigorous conversational style and used forms adapted from the dramatic monologue. But he was also indebted to Browning's example for the dominant mode of the Cantos, the fusion of poetry and history. Aristotle, in distinguishing between the two, had conceded that historical events might be appropriate poetic subjects if they corresponded with universals, and Browning and Pound both felt that their favorite historical periods, at least, had enduring significance. Both poets responded strongly to the mute eloquence of old books, objects, towns, and works of art. J. P. Sullivan has observed that Pound was so fully occupied with that he seemed to do his work in a musee imaginaire.' After the first of the Cantos had been published, Pound wrote to Margaret Anderson: I desire to go on with my long poem; and like the Duke of Chang, I desire to hear the music of a lost dynasty. (Have managed to hear it, in fact) .' 2 Pound's feeling for was clearly his own. But Browning's historical poems, especially Sordello, and, to a lesser extent, The Ring and the Book, seem to have shown him how historical materials could contribute to the renovation of poetry. Like Browning, he believed that certain aspects of the past reflected his own convictions with special clarity, and offered indispensable chances for demonstrating the cohesion of fact and poetic imagination. This approach to had strong support among the Romantics. In arguing that poetry is superior to story in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley criticized strictly factual accounts as the moths of just history because they omitted the per-

This article discusses Marshall McLuhan’s idea of Canada and his work on poetry, poetics, humanities, and related subjects. McLuhan’s sense of poetry, poetics, technology, culture, and nature depends in part upon his view of Canada. He sees the connections between the United States and Canada while also admitting some distinctions. Britain, France, Canada, and the United States are interrelated in the forging of boundaries and identities. The article assumes that McLuhan’s contribution to the long-time debate on Canadian identity is thoughtful, poetic, far-reaching, and deserving of detailed attention. The figure of the artist is important for McLuhan, who says that the electric age should be the opposite of surface and requires more thought and work. Discussing poetry, McLuhan examines Ezra Pound, who wrote notes to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. McLuhan provides notes or glosses to his own work in his poetic vision in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and his culture of poetics and poetics of culture were of Toronto, the University of Toronto, Canada, North America, and beyond. For McLuhan, the electric age gives Canada – a borderline case – advantages and provides new ways of thinking.

Frank Davey, Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1980). vii, 198. $5.95 paper Frank Davey’s Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster is a most perceptive account of the two poets’ strengths and weaknesses, and of their place in the development of “modernist” poetry in Canada. Though they are very different poets, Dudek, influenced by Ezra Pound, and Souster, influenced by William Carlos Williams, together “established the credibility of collo­ quial speech” (p. 174) in Canadian poetry. Dudek, who has always railed against the commercialization of literature, is here credited as well with making “a full commitment to place the needs of his culture ahead of personal literary reputation and advancement” (p. 46). Davey observes accurately that Dudek’s three long poems, Europe, En México, and Atlantis defy and frustrate the processes by which poetic reputations have been made in Canada in this century. They are much too long to be read at one sitting or to be included in trade or college anthologies. Because the individual sections derive much of their power from the context, excerpts but weakly represent the whole if they are anthologized separately. In these poems, Dudek also eschews the attention-getting devices used by his contemporaries: Layton’s bombastic rhetoric and sensational opinions, Smith’s and Page’s delicate fretworks of rhyme and image, Cohen’s melancholy surrealism, Purdy’s endearing folksiness and garrulity or Atwood’s terse psychodrama. Unlike these writers, Dudek does not try to make a commodity of his personality by using a self-image which can be loved, hated, envied or reviled by the reader. (Pp. 53-54) Davey agrees with most previous critics in pronouncing En México the most successful of Dudek’s long poems. Passion is fused with intelligence here as it is in the “Epilogue” to Atlantis. Observing this, one is tempted to conclude that Dudek the poet benefits greatly from an all too infrequent tendency to go a bit overboard (or, in En México, to succumb a little to the call of the jungle), to depart from Dudek the critic’s very Canadian insis­ tence on balance, reason, and moderation. The latter has always maintained that great art is rational, yet in recent years he has also allowed that “Art is a moderate kind of madness” (p. 91). This “madness” generates effects of sound and rhythm and imagery that magnificently transcend the mass of banal detail and commentary with which, for much of Europe and Atlantis, Dudek sought to counter the obscurity of his mentor Pound. Dudek is an unjustly neglected poet (perhaps partly by choice, since he is a kind of professional Jeremiah), and Davey has fairly presented his faults and virtues. It is a pity, though, that he does not deal with the poems that 122 follow Atlantis, since all of Dudek’s later reflections are of considerable interest. The widely anthologized Raymond Souster is a poet read by people who otherwise don’t read poetry. Davey indicates both the limitations and the strengths that result from Souster’s rather simplistic “binary interpretation” of the world. According to Davey, the usually very straightforward Souster nevertheless evades certain areas of experience, especially sexuality, often “ to maintain the contrast between nature and death which is the basis of his poetic vision” (p. 14 1). Davey makes much of Souster’s division of reality into an “outside” world of joy in nature and an “inside” world of war and death, but there are also poems which celebrate an “inside” world of refuge from the cold and cruel “outside” world, so his use of these categories can be confusing rather than helpful to the student of Souster’s work. There is a duality, but it could be more thoroughly explored. Davey also observes that Souster has demonstrated less historical con­ sciousness than Dudek. But he rather neglects Souster’s war poems, and he doesn’t sufficiently deal with the fact that the poet has in recent years been attempting to address history with his series of “ Pictures of a Long-lost World.” In Twelve Voices (Borealis Press, 1981), interviews with twelve Canadian poets by Jon Pearce, Souster speaks of these as “preliminary gropings...

<i>Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination</i>, by W. Anthony Sheppard

OR the purposes of a literary dialect (which is always a modification of a popular dialect as the latter is a modification of a language2) it is sufficient the poet of the Kentucky Mountain Cycle to have full precedent at first hand, as he assures us, every usage employed, in addition to having woven into his pages many locutions actually heard in the mountains. But the purposes of literature (which has to do with style rather than language) it is more important that these literal data serve as a guide to intelligent selection of the most distinctive forms and as models for creative, not imitative purposes, so that without violating the spirit of the original the poet has yet transcended the letter, transforming whatever he borrows. Most interesting of all, however, to the student of the Kentucky Mountain Cycle is the development of mountain speech within the Cycle itself from a state of solution, as it were, in the earlier works, to the crystallized forms of the later. In Weathergoose-Woo!, which represents the perfection of the poet's handling of his medium, dialect (too often the master rather than the servant of the folk-writer) has been fully assimilated to the rhythmic and emotional texture of the poet's imagination, caught up and absorbed by a powerful, unbounded spiritual stream which (like the Musketaquit of Emerson's Two Rivers) flows not only in a pent river-shut up in the banks of actual speech custom-but also, sentient and creative, rocks and through the air and through rays of light, as well, and through darkness, and through men and women. Directly related to Mr. MacKaye's bardic and dramatic ideal of sung, or chanted,3 speech is his oral style embodying oral imagina-

Psychotic Apotheosis: Visionary Iconicity and Poet's Fear in Ezra Pound's "The Return"

The paper will try to explore the contribution of William Faulkner to Modernism: his response to Ezra Pound's imperative "Make it New".It will summarize some of Faulkner's most distinguished "modern innovations" in his mythological kingdom Yoknapatawpha -a cosmos of his own, which goes beyond the time he lived in and created them in.They will be illuminated from different critical perspectives with the idea to open a critical conversation on Steven Connor's "Modernism after Postmodernism", and to be closed with Stephen Ross's "Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading."A look backward at some English Department contributions to understanding the complex poetics of William Faulkner and Modernism will also be presented.