2.11.08 | Pound+Eliot

1. 2.11.08 | Pound+Eliot • Business • Imagisme • Talent • Objective Correlative • Poetry • HW • William Carlos Williams tomorrow. Listen for echoes and responses to Pound+Eliot • 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, we’ll 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 dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s 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. Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. [SOUND FAMILIAR? HINT: EMERSON]Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t 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 (BrunettoLatini) 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?