2'11'08 Pound Eliot

1
2.11.08 PoundEliot

• Business
• Imagisme
• Talent
• Objective Correlative
• Poetry
• HW
• William Carlos Williams tomorrow. Listen for
  echoes and responses to PoundEliot
• We will be talking papers tomorrow. I want to
  show examples. If you DO NOT want your paper seen
  by peers, even anonymously, please email me
  tonight to let me know.

2
Last time

• We left off our discussion of Emerson thinking
  about how Language mediates our relationship with
  nature.
• According to E.,
• Words come from natural phenomenon
• natural phenomenon have the form of our thoughts
• Thus and plus, nature is the symbol of our spirit
• In other words, our understanding of reality and
  our relationship to it is played out in the
  relationship between words and things. We know
  ourselves, we know our world through language.
• For this reason Emerson is very invested in
  American Poetry, for it is through poetry that we
  gain insight into how words are used, thus into
  nature. AND, if we continue to produce poetry in
  the old forms, well never get that original
  relation to the universe.

3
Enter Imagisme

• Flint
• not Dogma
• Direct treatment of the "thing," whether
  subjective or objective.
• To use absolutely no word that did not contribute
  to the presentation.
• As regarding rhythm to compose in sequence of
  the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
  metronome.
• Snobisme I found among them an earnestness that
  is amazing to one accustomed to the usual London
  air of poetic dilettantism. They consider that
  Art is all science, all religion, philosophy and
  metaphysic. It is true that snobisme may be urged
  agains them but it is at least snobisme in its
  most dynamic form, with a great deal of sound
  sense and energy behind it and they are stricter
  with themselves than any outsider.

4
Imagisme

• First
• To begin with, consider the three rules recorded
  by Mr. Flint, not as dogmanever consider
  anything as dogmabut as the result of long
  contemplation, which, even if it is some one
  elses contemplation, may be worth consideration.
  
• The image
• An Image is that which presents an intellectual
  and emotional complex in an instant of time. I
  use the term complex rather in the technical
  sense employed by the newer psychologists, such
  as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in
  our application. It is the presentation of such
  a complex instantaneously which gives that
  sense of sudden liberation that sense of freedom
  from time limits and space limits that sense of
  sudden growth, which we experience in the
  presence of the greatest works of art.
• Things
• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does
  not reveal something. Dont use such an
  expression as dim lands of peace. It dulls the
  image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete.
  It comes from the writers not realizing that the
  natural object is always the adequate symbol.
  SOUND FAMILIAR? HINT EMERSONGo in fear of
  abstractions. Dont retell in mediocre verse what
  has already been done in good prose. Dont think
  any intelligent person is going to be deceived
  when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the
  unspeakably difficult art of good prose by
  chopping your composition into line lengths.

5
The So What?

• Stakes
• Goal
• Process

6
Tradition and the Individual Talent

• What is tradition?
• According to Eliot, why is a knowledge of
  tradition necessary?
• What role does the individual play?
• What happens is a continual surrender of himself
  as he is at the moment to something which is more
  valuable. The progress of an artist is a
  continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction
  of personality. 83
• There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry,
  which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact,
  the bad poet is usually unconscious where he
  ought to be conscious, and conscious where he
  ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make
  him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of
  emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not
  the expression of personality, but an escape from
  personality. But, of course, only those who have
  personality and emotions know what it means to
  want to escape from these things. 86

7
The Science of Poetry

• The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the
  two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the
  presence of a filament of platinum, they form
  sulphurous acid. This combination takes place
  only if the platinum is present nevertheless the
  newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum,
  and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected
  has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The
  mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may
  partly or exclusively operate upon the experience
  of the man himself but, the more perfect the
  artist, the more completely separate in him will
  be the man who suffers and the mind which
  creates the more perfectly will the mind digest
  and transmute the passions which are its material.

8

•   The experience, you will notice, the elements
  which enter the presence of the transforming
  catalyst, are of two kinds emotions and
  feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the
  person who enjoys it is an experience different
  in kind from any experience not of art. It may be
  formed out of one emotion, or may be a
  combination of several and various feelings,
  inhering for the writer in particular words or
  phrases or images, may be added to compose the
  final result. Or great poetry may be made without
  the direct use of any emotion whatever composed
  out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno
  (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion
  evident in the situation but the effect, though
  single as that of any work of art, is obtained by
  considerable complexity of detail. The last
  quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to
  an image, which "came," which did not develop
  simply out of what precedes, but which was
  probably in suspension in the poet's mind until
  the proper combination arrived for it to add
  itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a
  receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless
  feelings, phrases, images, which remain there
  until all the particles which can unite to form a
  new compound are present together.

9
The Objective Correlative.

• The only way of expressing emotion in the form of
  art is by finding an "objective correlative" in
  other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
  chain of events which shall be the formula of
  that particular emotion such that when the
  external facts, which must terminate in sensory
  experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
  evoked.

10
So What?

• We have gathered an understanding of the
  positions.
• Pound direct treatment of the thing, through
  use of concrete, natural symbols, to rise an
  intellectual and emotional complex in an instant.
  
• Eliot depersonalization, art as a science of
  combination of elements that catalyze into an
  experience.
• So what? This is where we interpret their
  claims in terms of our broader stakes, those
  raised by Emerson.
• Under this theory of poetry
• Is there a connection between words and natural
  phenomenon? If so, what is it?
• Can this theory of poetry give us an original
  relationship with nature? If so, what kind?

11
The Poems.

• In a Station of the Metro
•  
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• Others you want to look at in this light?