Ezra Pound Poetry


Pound, one of the most outstanding modern poets, has endeavored his entire artistic gifts for poetry's swift development. He has strived hardly to evolve a number of different methods or techniques for the expansion of modern poetry; evidently, he was ultimately open, the most public, the least repetitive. Moreover, his poetic experiments were ultimately various approximating extreme objectivity as supported by a courageous classical detachment. In addition to that, he as a subtle character, intended an extraordinary nineteenth century notion of grandeur of the romantic scale together with a 20th century notion of precision and economy.

It is worth noting that Pound adopted the 'organic form' whose idea already existed in romantic critical theory, but it is hardly achieved or achieved with any degree of completeness until the twentieth century. In fact, he strongly dismissed the predetermined shapes and forms arguing that it is the poetic experience as well as the poetic instinct that determines both syntax and form. Thus, Pound considered that the packing into a container doesn't sufficiently acknowledge the kind of reciprocity, interchange and mutual modification that can occur between a traditional form and its content. He also believed in the absolute simplicity and directness of utterance, for poetry according to him must be as well written as good prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech saved by a heightened emotional as well as musical intensity. Accordingly, unnecessary epithets and redundant adjectives are elements of aesthetic degradation, for they are one of the things that we couldn't in our daily life, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Therefore, Pound did bring the language of his poetry nearer to daily speech where even the dullest and most turgid parts of his poems are ultimately pure, direct and extremely clear.

Pound, in his attempt to capture the dominating aesthetic principles of modern poetry, has evolved a magnificent, stylistic technique known under the name of Cantos. In fact, Pound never tried a moment to explain such technique, for he strongly believed that 'beauty should be presented, never explained'. Consequently, he presented infront of the reader four different cantos in which the complete absence of a rhyme scheme pattern and a standard meter is so obvious. As a matter of fact, in offering passages, to put words into a text from the first canto; images from the second; and an interpolation from the third, Pound succeeded to demonstrate to himself as well as to his colleagues how units from a single conception could stand juxtaposed without explanation and without linking, and standout more sharply and clearly as a result. Thus, an impersonal collage of mosaic was the essence of such method in which the items, large or small, invented or quoted, taken from life or recalled from art, were to stand in hard-edge relation, one to another, without explanatory or connective matter. 

Once again, it is worth noting that Pound was not by any means a symbolist. Instead, he was an eccentric imagist calling for total objectivity and denouncing slavish subjectivity. Furthermore, in Pound's poetry, the emphasis fell greatly on visual imagery where the visual elements, predominated over aural, and so the mind was turned outward towards the world. In addition, Pound images have a variable significance especially when added one to another, without the imposition of a structure and without logical or narrative continuity. Pound in such method defeated our rigid education that taught us so remorselessly to intellectualize and to ask what things mean. It is difficult for us to believe that an experience has any value until it has been interpreted, which is to say abstracted, linked to other experiences, placed in a category and had its concrete character beaten out of it. Nevertheless, Pound had the chance to prove that all poems which are truly poetry and not simply versified statement must be in some degree open to the differing interpretations where our various needs and personalities with circumstances imposed upon them.

Pound, as it is well known, proved to the whole world that poetry is not a form but a quality that is one sense of such quality does not depend upon understanding in the way, or to the degree, that one's sense of the value of a piece of prose is. Hence, Pound succeeds to show clearly that a poem should be sensed in its particularity, without necessarily seeing, or feeling any anxiety about its connection with what precedes and follows.

T.S.Eliot Poetry


Eliot, who was an extraordinary poet, has successfully grabbed the very spirit of modernism so early and more or less complete simply because he became a modernist poet even before modernism had been invented. As a matter of fact, Eliot was able to put himself into a picturesque category along with other modernist figures, like Picasso, especially when he enraged journalists who approached him about the meaning of one or another of his poems or plays by replying:"it means what you want it to mean". Thus, he proved that all poems that are truly poetry and not simply versified statements must be in some degree open to the differing interpretations according to our various needs, personalities and circumstances imposed upon them.

It is worth noting that Eliot's poetry approximates symbolist rather Imagist movement for the sensuous emphasis in his poetry fell more upon the ear than the eye, a music which cast the feeling inward declaring an instantaneous verbal rather semi-musical event. In other words, Eliot's poems delivered a succession of deeply interwoven sounds that has the ultimate ability to provoke the reader's imagination, and therefore allowing at the same time an overflowing of passionate feelings. In fact, his poetry parallels closely the developments of non-representational techniques in painting and of a tonality in music. Moreover, what characterizes such poetry is that the diction moves more closely to that of prose; it uses no special poetic terms, no decorative inversions, and it sheds some of the abstract burden which prose carries. Furthermore, such poetry, for the first time, seems to declare emphatically that it exists in its own right and for its own sake; besides, its simple diction and its apparently orthodox syntax mime meaningful speech so perfectly, offering, in their sedative music, such a sense of case and comfort.

Eliot, unlike Yeats dismissed any kind of predetermined forms, for he rejected the enslavement to the hindering restraints that prevented any poetic experience to be projected in its full aesthetic features. Thus, Eliot has the further freedom of "vers libre" and the "open form"; therefore, he adopted a wide range of musical and metrical possibilities that could always appeal to his instinct. In fact, Eliot always began with the music-that arouses a feeling, a rhythm, a cluster of images, something just coming into focus and works toward crystallizing it. As a result, his poem finds its form as it goes where the sense of the lines may be patterned by the music, rather than the music by the sense. In addition, his poetry forces us to recognize that a poem is essentially a verbal machine far more complex in its operations than any meaning, it may accidentally said to have, or express, or contain.

It's worth noting that despite Eliot's great artistic gifts, he was open to attacks of the surrounding circumstances. Accordingly, as he became more deliberate, more responsible, more answerable to the world, he denies himself a liberty, a freedom of imagination, which in turn robs his poetic language of some of its life, and this is done in the name of something external and at the same time abstract to the poem, such as a political faith, or a religious doctrine. In fact, Eliot, in his submission to religious as well as political influences, favored his ordinary self over the poetic one depriving it from its quality of completeness; nevertheless, he was already aware of the pressure the world exerted upon the preserve of the poetic imagination, and the temptation to give into it. Consequently, Eliot's continuing allegiance to 'Action Francaise' and his unequalled support to the 'Fascist Movement' made him blindly driven to examining the elements in the situation, mainly the situation of the poetic experience which frustrated his labor as an artist.

As a matter of fact, Eliot, despite any deficiencies that always threatened his reputation as a modern poet, presented magnificent poems which are very near to the techniques of modern painter. He were developing at the same time, in which colors and forms were worked into relationship, not in order to "represent" in any direct and obvious sense, but to create an artistic unity, where 'artistic' means neither objective realism nor pure subjective design but an enactment of their meaning.

Wallace Stevens Poetry

Wallace Stevens, an outstanding and a remarkable poet, has succeeded to make his poetry increasingly received, due recognition, as one of the great achievements of our time running through endless transformations of setting and mood, in which the life of the mind, caught in its double fate of self and world, is the constant theme of the drama. Moreover, Stevens' poetry is a poetry of the most lavish variety and the most profound unity, of the most baffling obscurity and the most immediate power. In fact, his poetry is an outer projection rather an outcome of the moral and theoretic unity of his beliefs which proves that Stevens was a master of a remarkably precise and clear sighted doctrine whose main issue sheds the light on the major aspects of actual poetry. 

As a matter of fact, Stevens' poetry ranges between two dominating rather powerful and contending temperamental strains. For instance, on the one hand, his poetry reveals an absolutely skeptical spirit for who denounces as well as dismiss religion in its rigid concepts and in its eccentric inflexibility, believing that the god is a supreme poetic idea rather an ultimate illusion, to which we must come when we have achieved disillusion with respect to all false ideals. On the other hand, Stevens restless and contemptuous poetry that approximates the vulgar esthetics, is at the same time balanced by soft poetry that tries to grab a possible basis for affirmation and acceptance driven by an irresistible tendency towards peace of mind and comfort of soul. As a result, the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the record of a lifelong attempt to discover what must be rejected and what can be affirmed in the translation of a pure poetic experience. 

It is worth noting that Stevens sought in his poetry the transcendental truth that lies behind the sensed world where the search of a single truth in an impossible and a fruitless task. As a result, Stevens rejects Christianity as much on moral and emotional as on intellectual grounds, for although the grand design posited by religion no longer commands acceptance, the mind's desire for order and meaningfulness in its world remains and must be satisfied. Consequently, a new order must be discovered and affirmed where a valid order has its sources in man himself and the reality of his experience. On the other hand, Stevens' poetry presents in front of us a violent refusal to the impotent consolations of wishful thinking and sentimentalist; therefore, declaring a pattern of steps towards a state of a spiritual exactest poverty in which all the false wealth of the spirit has been castaway for being the godfather of the misleading abstractness and the eluding fancies. 

The unbounded effectiveness of Stevens' poetry lies in his incredible ability to create an image of whatever sort the occasion requires. Accordingly, when Stevens is able to appeal unconditionally to his magnificent poetic experience, he delivers a true poetry which ceases to be dominated by negative emotions and moves toward satisfaction, affirming a limited but valid relationship among certain parts of the transcendental world. Hence, he succeeded in such creations to attain a level of imaginative capability that is accompanied by a calm and lucid strength as distinguished from visionary fervor or exaltation where the language of the poems appears to be extremely and correspondingly simple rather purely clear. 

It is worth noting, here at the end, that the poetry of Stevens records from day to day the life of a changing consciousness in a changing world. Because it is a human record, it presents contradictions which cannot be resolved in logical terms, for it can only find reconciliation in such revolting poetry. Its inconsistency reflects those fluctuations of inner strength whereby the adversities that depress us at one time exhilarate us at another. But more importantly, it reflects the fact that while the goal of the mind remains as a side issue, our progress towards it takes different forms according to our state or the conditions of the external world.      

The Gyres: Yeats's Themes and Motifs

Many of the ideas of A Vision can distract from the poetry. They may even actually confuse the reading of a poem which is accessible without them. We do not, for example, need to know that the 'wandering gyre' of the falcon's flight in 'The Second Coming' connects with his vision of history, and it could be argued that the connection actually diminishes the power and universality of the poem, making it a smaller, more thesis-ridden work than it is without this knowledge. Likewise, in 'Sailing to Byzantium' the phrase 'perne in a gyre' is perhaps the only major flaw in the poem, bringing in an extraneous and unnecessary complication to a poem, bringing in an extraneous and unnecessary complication to a poem otherwise transparent. (A 'perne' can be both a bobbin and a peregrine falcon; here, to complicate interpretation further, it could be either noun or verb.)

It is only in its large sweep that Yeats's philosophy is necessary to understand the poetry. In the poem, 'The Gyres', for example, we need to know only its barest outlines. The title invokes his most notorious concept (usually pronounced with a hard 'g'). The poem can be very simply paraphrased: an old man, facing death, takes a kind of heady consolation from the fact that all things pass and come around again, and delights in charting the details of the modern disintegration. Even though itself, we are told, gets worn out. Beauty and worth outlive themselves; 'ancient lineaments' (the lines of a face, with the hint perhaps of a family lineage preserved by family features) suffer extinction. 

The present age (the late 1930s), the poem suggests, is a time of such extinction on a large scale. The blood-dimmed tide of 'The Second Coming' has been released on the earth. By a kind of transference, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles (who believed all things are a mingling of the four elements, held together by love or separated by strife, perpetually entering into new configurations) is held responsible for the present disorderliness in things. Another Troy is about to burn, like all those old civilizations put to the sword in 'Lapis Lazuli'. But 'what does it matter?' Yeats asks. All that we need to do is ' "Rejoice!" ' This poem is a powerful expression of Yeats's delight in an apocalyptic view of things.

'Old Rocky Face' in the 'The Gyres' represents that supernatural world beyond history, from which, Yeats's mysticism, all true meaning derive. In 'The Man and the Echo' it becomes 'Rocky Voice'. This poem however implies that the supernatural voice of the oracle is only the echo of human explanations, projected onto the abyss and coming back to us as divine wisdom. Yet significantly, though the Voice reiterates the man's words with the instructions 'Lie down and die' and 'Into the night', it does not echo as a command the last word of his argumentative and unanswered question: 'Shall we in that great night rejoice?' 

By contrast, 'The Gyres' suggests that the only attitude to take towards all this tumult is to 'laugh in tragic joy', accept and rejoice in whatever is coming, and stand above it. This is the posture taken by the Hamlet and Lear of 'Lapis Lazuli', who embrace 'Tragedy wrought to its uttermost' with a 'Gaiety transfiguring all that dread'. For, as Yeats says there: 

All things fall are built again,
and those that build them again are gay. 

The recurrence of all things links these poems with the poem Yeats chose to make the vehicle of his own epitaph, 'Under Ben Bulben'. Here again he tells us, speaking of the eternal return, that 'Gyres run on'. In 'The Gyres' recurrence is enacted by the way in which the word 'gyres' returns at the end, having been exclaimed twice at the very beginning of the poem, confirming stylistically what it claims as a truth, that 'all things [will] run/On that unfashionable gyre again'. But what are these 'gyres'?

In A Vision Yeats conceived of history as composed of two cones, rotating in opposite directions, the apex of each at the centre of the other's widest arc.Every moment in time moves through these opposing spirals. Any one moment thus contains two antithetical, interpenetrating movements, for one cone is widening as the other, whirling in the opposite direction, narrows. These spiraling motions are the gyres. The times of maximum historical turbulence are those where the gyres reverse their motions. These great historical reversals occur every cycle of two thousand years (the 'Great Year'), at those moments where previously expanding cone begins to contract and the previously contracting cone to expand.   

Throughout history, the interpretation of the gyres means that one dominant historical principle, the primary phase, is always shadowed by its antithesis, the objective by the subjective, and vice versa. The rape of Leda by a god in the shape of a swan is thus reversed in the annunciation of the dove to Mary. Christ, as the male god of love, reverses the female bringer of strife, Helen. In turn, these phases of the Great Year are reproduced in the twenty-eight 'Phases of the Moon', set out in Yeats's poem of that name, and explained at length in A Vision. 

Before the full moon of history, the subjective principle holds sway, and men seek fulfillment in themselves, in mastery of thought and action. After the full, men turn outwards, towards the objective world, before which they shrink in servitude, as in our own era. But the complete darkness without any moon of the twenty-eight phase, that of complete objectivity, brings a reversal, a movement back to subjectivity. It is in the movement between these antithetical gyres that human history and personal life are shaped.

In some of the later poems, a knowledge of the philosophy certainly helps to elucidate what is otherwise obscure in poems which get a great deal of their power from the esoteric doctrine they propound. But most of Yeats's poetry can be approached without worrying too much about this doctrine. For those who are interested in the philosophy, however, the clearest exposition and analysis is probably that of Northrop Frye, in An Honoured Guest. In this book, he explains: "The human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; and this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. The man, in whom the movement inward is stronger than the movement outward, the man who sees all reflected within himself, the subjective man, reaches the narrow end of a gyre at death, for death is always, they contend, even when it seems the result of accident, preceded by an intensification of the subjective life; and has a monument of revelation immediately after death, a revelation which they describe as his being carried into the presence of all his dead kindred, a moment whose objectivity is exactly equal to the subjectivity of death. The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This view is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place. This is too simple a statement, for much detail is possible.