It deeply offends Tere when the author of “Eureka” is mentioned. We observe a law, as in physics. It IS a physical law, in fact.

Critical faculties exist as much as any object, but we cannot see them–only their results.

If one embrace the modernism of Pound/Williams/Black Mountain, that pot of dullness, that scrabby, sexist band, it follows–as the night the day–that one CANNOT (and here is the law) ponder the graceful author of “Eureka” without feeling uncomfortable, offended, disturbed, in a manner which the modernist devotee cannot quite understand, but which is nonetheless as REAL as any physical law. It is not only the author of “Eureka” who offends; Pound chose to explicitly ignore an entire spectrum of the BEST in literature, in giving his world lit. syllabus to the world in 1929. It is right there in black and white in ‘How To Read.’ When this is pointed out, when the ACTUAL TEXT of Pound is put before the modernist devotee, when all the gossip about Pound’s p.r. work is put aside for 10 seconds, frantic backpedaling and excuses result.

Having swallowed Pound’s Modernism, their stomach CANNOT tolerate other foods: even to taste ‘The Rationale of Verse’ or ‘Ulalume’ or ‘The Purloined Letter,’ or to read with pleasure the poetry of Percy Shelley makes them ill. They turn as green-faced as T.S. Eliot.

Thomas
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Ezra Pound is closer to the Unabomber than Edgar Poe is to Stephen King. Pound and King are minor authors. Poe is not.

Thomas
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“That’s colorful language coming from a pacifist like you, most at home among the tall trees and the beehives, and I wondered if you’d care to comment on it here. Do you still feel that way?”

Mr. Woodman, it seems the ironic tone in my comment those many months ago did not carry over; which I figure is the problem with online (flatline) communication. I no more extolled silverback behavior back then, do now, or ever have. Mine was an observation on human behavior. I figure the silverback behavior will likely kill off our species. People, wanting to think they are in some way special or annointed, tend not to reckon with the fact that genetically they are .1 percent different from the next highiest primate. As expressed behaviorally a genetic difference of .1 percent is not much to go on.

But I see that, once again, a conversation has been turned back on E.A. Poe, rather like an in-grown toenail.

Terreson
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The grand Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas (born 1917 and going strong) has a long magisterial poem on Pound, published in my translation by Green Integer. Maybe I’ll post it sometime, but I don’t want to Desmond the thread.

Now monomanaiacal Ez begets equally didactic Brady. Modernism as the root of poetic evil? Too late, my brother; too late, but never mind.
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Have you read Pound’s “How To Read?” It’s like watching a man swatting imaginary flies. The guy was a lunatic. You sound like a fresh-faced intern in the p.r. dept of the House of Pound.

It’s time to drop this line of apology. You know what? I don’t care who Pound “recognized.” Writers “recognize” each other all the time. Poe recognized Hawthorne–and you can read how Poe did so right here. http://www.eapoe.org They were NOT friends, by the way. Where are the writings of Pound that make another writer more memorable for us? Where? Where are these memorable writings of Pound? Not gossip. Writings. On Hemingway, for instance? How does Pound get credit for Hemingway? Remember when the public recognized genius? If a writer was “recognized” by Pound, that’s a strike against them. A good writer will prevail against all sorts of “recognitions.”

Thomas
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if recognizing the ‘genius’ of edgar allen is a litmus test, count me as ignorant, too. developing a poe-sy taste aversion very early on was a disguised blessing in that it kept me from ever reading goosebumps or the poetry of stephen king, in whose company his work properly belongs.
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Poe dedicated his prose poem “Eureka” (1848) to Alexander von Humboldt.

Yes, Goethe is another giant which the idiotic Pound in his “How To Read,” (1929) his definitive curriculum for the brave new university of modernistic pedantics, completely leaves out. According to Pound, the student should NOT read Goethe, Schiller, Poe, Pindar, Swift, Pope, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Virgil, Milton, Plato, Aristotle, any Russian author, and Shakespeare, but should earnestly study Confucius, Villon and the author of “Madame Bovary.” Pound was not only ignorant, he was stupid. Yet we concede all sorts of importance to this jackass.

Can we just call this thread ‘The Fallacy of Rejecting Pound?’
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It’s interesting that you feel that in America there is a “culture of argument,” whereas in European countries debate tends to be far more intense, colorful and even ad hominem than it is here. The Houses of Parliament are a zoo, for a start, and no Member is safe there without a very thick skin and a whole arsenal of well-honed spears, automatic weapons, stink-bombs and whoopy cushions–all beautifully expressed, of course, with graceful figures of speech, Latin tags and Old School drivel. The put-down is almost more important than the politics!

What I’m remembering is a discussion you and I had just under a year ago on Poets.net on a thread called “What If Emily Dickinson Belonged to a Workshop Group.” I went back and looked, and found that you wrote to me at that time: “Lordy, but we men do love the fur and feather display of prowess when in the same territorial reach of each other. Comment intended as much a self-observation as a remark on the silver back behavior of all men. And I swear to the holy mother of the species but the behavior seems to get accentuated among poets.”

That’s colorful language coming from a pacifist like you, most at home among the tall trees and the beehives, and I wondered if you’d care to comment on it here. Do you still feel that way?
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“Okay, Michael, sorry about that. Tell your colleague M. Robins that I like his book. I just came across some of your poems (I think)….five of them published in La Petite Zine, and like them, indeed…and you’re right, they have nothing to do with Tate.

I’m having a difficult time trying to figure out who people are. I’ve lived in Europe since 1984. I try to keep up with what’s going on, but of course it’s not all that easy. There is a lot going on here too.

Admittedly, I’m not used to the aggression. There’s more of a sense of decorum in Europe, which I’ve internalized over the years.

But I think that my response to your comments holds and that the basic technology/theory analogy in my post, while it might not be watertight, is at least interesting. Looking at your poems (if they are yours) I think we might have more in common than you think.

I just don’t understand your tone, which is duplicated in other threads, responding to other posts. Why the aggression?”

I’ve been thinking about this post of yours for a while. Then I realized why it kept resonating with me. Some months ago on a salon style, poetry based, board I run a member started up a thread she called ‘Against the Argument Culture.’ What followed was a pretty lively discussion. Even people who normally keep quiet spoke up and their opinions were pretty strong. There were those who felt that a pugilistic approach to conversation was not only best but creative. And there were those who felt differently, who, in fact, felt that argument for its own sake is counter-productive in the same way, say, that the game of tic tac toe always cancels out both players. Nobody wins. The latter group was very much against this thing called a culture of argument. The former as fervently for it. Speaking as an inveterate observer and student of human behavior I found the exchange completely fascinating, especially since, as I had figured would happen, no middle ground was ever found. (You know how it is in cold wars. Nobody ever wins. Each side just wears the other down. Kind of like the Battle of Verdun in a hot war.)

Anyway, the member who started the thread posted a link to a blog page of the same title “Against Argument Culture.” Here is that link:

http://artdurkee.blogspot.com/2008/09/against-argument-culture.html

If you go to the page you will find mention of an author named Deborah Tannen who has written a piece she called “For Argument’s Sake, why do we feel compelled to argue about everything.” The page gives a link to her article too.

The point of my post is this: back here in America the, albeit dominant, culture of argument is also viewed by my many of us as lacking in decorum and even more lacking in productivity.

On a lighter note, down here in America’s Bible belt I saw a bumper sticker the other day that tickled me to no end. It read: Come the Rapture we have the earth to ourselves.

Terreson
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In fact, Goethe knew both the Humboldt brothers when they were young men starting out at Jena, Germany. This would have been in the last decade of the 18th C., and after Goethe returned from his second visit to Italy, much the changed man in that way the south of Europe had (has?) for changing north Europeans inclined to the Gothic. Goethe cavorted with the brothers at the same time he was cavorting with Fichte, Schiller, Herder, and, I think, Kant. What an extraordinary time that must have been for Germany. But I’ll leave off. Too much of a digression from the thread’s topic.

Terreson
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Neruda draws from both strands. World poets moan round with many voices.

The problem with “modernism” as a term, as well as post-mo and its pal post-avant, is total lack of content. We’re now! We’re nower than now! Who ain’t?

Jarrell is a wonderful critic but all our extended Oedipal windmill tilting against Pound and Eliot, given their sins, is like fighting Nude Descending a Staircase, all over. Broom vs. surf.
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But you’ve asked for a response to the sentence quoted from: “Because ‘the greatest artist,’ according to the manifesto, ‘will be the one who least defines himself, and who writes in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.’”

I got one culture hero who passes all of my tests and against whom I measure everyone, man or woman. The same guy Napolean, at the height of his power, deferred to. Goethe. His really was an original character type, one of a kind. I’ve read a Jungian thinker to call Goethe’s character centroverted, standing out against both the introvert and extrovert, and likened to the Osirian archetype. Many years ago I read a Gide essay that fully developed the extent to which all artists and thinkers since Goethe are beholding to him. I am convinced it is true. I don’t know how it is in Europe or South American these days, but it blows me away the extent to which he has been subsumed in North America, at least in the U.S. All but forgotten. And I could bore all with the Goethe lore. Scientist, statesman, poet, novelist, imitator of the ancient Persian Hafiz, writer of Europe’s first international best seller, and the creator of more than a few conceptual constructs still in play in many different artistic and intellectual disciplines. Not many men or women are essential to the human story. Goethe is.

The quote brings me to a poem of his called “Humility.” Here is a prose translation of the poem’s last strophe:

“I cannot divide life, cannot divide what is within and what is without; I must give all of you the whole, if I am to live with you and with myself. I have always written just what I felt, just what I thought; and thus, my dear friends, I split myself up and remain always one and the same.”

This is the sense in which I read your sentence. If correct it would not be the first time Goethe prefigured a Modern.

Terreson
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The sign of a great poem is that in the end it lives all by itself, without reference to anyone or anything. In addition, the great poem’s distinct voice continues to grow and develop as often as it is revisited. Indeed, one wonders how it could possibly ever have been written in the first place or, beyond even that, how the world could ever have managed to get started without it!

Like you feel about anyone you’ve really loved who is dying or dead.

Most importantly of all, the voice of the great poem speaks.

Such a voice doesn’t just warm up in the wings (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E= poetry), recite by rote (……), preach (……), gossip (……), record itself (……), talk to itself (……), speak in tongues (……), or masturbate (……) [I started working on this sentence and realized I didn't know enough to fill in the blanks, so I deleted it.]

Christopher
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Not the only measure of greatness, but a valid one.”

I agree with John.

This is what is so insidious, I think, by encouraging students to find ‘their voice.’ Great poets have many voices.
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That’s great you share Jarrell’s essay with your students.

I’m very impressed.

Now, as for this:

“but then Eliot also says: “[U]sually and conveniently taken [as] the starting-point of modern poetry, is the group denominated … ‘imagist’ in London about 1910. I was not there.”

Sure, Eliot’s going to say that: it makes his friend Pound more important. The Modernists/Fugitives/New Critics were constantly helping each other out in this way. They knew the game.

Terreson is obviously a devotee, wearing a picture of Ezra Pound around his neck…

Martin,

How “local?” Larkin’s famous “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?” remark reveals “local” can be fiercely arrogant; yes, “local,” as you put it, but if Larkin wanted to put blinders on, who are we to blame him? It’s a poet’s secret re: sense experience, put this way by Poe (perhaps the true inventor of Modernism) “Our senses sometimes see too little, but they always see too much.”

The view I’m getting from Knott, Terreson and company is a kind of ‘international!’ ‘local!’ and everything in between, so that we’re back at square one: Modernism is just too diverse: you can’t question it. Sorry, I’m with Jarrell. The agenda(s) of that little band, which included the Modernists and the Fugitive/New Critics needs to be questioned, for all sorts of reasons. I will not be swayed by anecdotes which attempt to turn the operations of a coterie into a pluralistic, naturalistic, inevitable phenomenon.

Thomas
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To repeat the same limited movement over and over again until oneself unmoving becomes the palette, with no further interference from the self.

The invisible artist.

Emily Dickinson. In a sense Philip Larkin.

Christopher
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A trad. measure of “greatness” is range — of mood, experience, vision, cognition, effect. Shakespeare. I agree with Christopher: The Pessoa quote could be describing Shakespeare.

Not the only measure of greatness, but a valid one.
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Some of my favorite poets are like that. Philip Larkin, for example, who could write in any form about anything!

Or W.H.Auden–who did have public hankerings, most certainly, but probably felt most at ease in his private pornography.

Or William Shakespeare, who just didn’t care!
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There was enormous cross-Atlantic traffic from the late 19th century onwards that bi-passed the United States completely. Painters, poets novelists, not to mention huge waves of emigration which formed the community basis for a pan-Latin culture. Of coarse, from my vantage here in Portugal, this is more than obvious, and this transit continues to this day.

So, Thomas, I don’t think where modernism occurred is completely irrelevant – art-making always adapts to (derives from) the local. Internationalist movements such as modernism contain many patterns of influence that were truly global. Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s greatest twentieth century poet brought Futurism to Portugal through his heteronymic alter-ego, Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa never left Portugal after arriving back from South Africa in 1905, and rarely left Lisbon, and yet he put Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ideas to good use in a local context. Here’s Richard Zenith on the subject in an article called “The Triumph of Álvaro de Campos” published in Literary Imagination 2.2, USA, Spring 2000:

Futurism never gained much of a footing in Portugal, where its literary significance is all but summed up — ingeniously so — in the poet-engineer who never existed. In addition to his Futurist odes, Campos was credited with a ranting and socially radical “Ultimatum,” published in the magazine Portugal Futurista, whose one and only issue saw print in 1917. After virulently indicting Europe and the “present age’s inadaptability and creative incapacity,” Campos’s manifesto proclaims the need for “artificial adaptation,” “sociological surgery,” the “abolition of the dogma of personality,” the “abolition of the notion of absolute truth” and various other measures that will pave the way for the “coming of a perfect, mathematical Humanity,” the “necessary advent of a Humanity of Engineers!” A humanity, in other words, made up of unreal figures like Álvaro de Campos. Because “the greatest artist,” according to the manifesto, “will be the one who least defines himself, and who writes in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.”

I’d be curious to know what all of you make of that last sentence.

Martin
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Terreson
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as for “modern”, doesn’t Eliot somewhere call Baudelaire the first modern poet?

but then Eliot also says: “[U]sually and conveniently taken [as] the starting-point of modern poetry, is the group denominated … ‘imagist’ in London about 1910. I was not there.” (page 58, To Criticize the Critic, FSG, 1965)

…
Paz doesn’t invalidate either Eliot or Jarrell, but his perspective is not insignificant, and is hardly “fatuous.”

…
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I agree with Paz: the Spanish-speaking tradition he mentions is ‘modern;’ however, it would be ridiculous, finally, to get into a quibble about what is ‘modern’ and when did it occur, and where, and so forth.

I could say Shakespeare is modern, but that’s not what Jarrell is finally addressing: the point isn’t ‘what is REALLY modern.’ Modern, modernismo or avant are only words. That’s one of my beefs with the Moderns–they hide behind that ridiculous word.

“cultural arrogance, ethnocentrism, and historical insensitivity…” uh…yea. Can you say “Ezra Pound?”

But it would be equally silly to ignore Jarrell’s essay in favor of some fatuous ‘modernismo’ stance, especially if one doesn’t publish in Spanish, or speak Spanish.

Or, even if one did…

Paz doesn’t cancel out Jarrell.

Thomas
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For [Anglo-American] critics the word “modernism” designates the community of works, authors, and tendencies evoked by such names as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, WC Williams, Hemingway, and others. Yet nearly everyone (except perhaps Anglo-American critics and reviewers) knows that in Spanish what we call “modernismo” is the first literary movement in Latin America and in Spain. Ruben Dario and Valle-Inclan, Juan Ramon Jimenez and Leopoldo Lugones, Jose Marti and Antonio Machado were all “modernistas”: with them our modern tradition begins, and without them our contemporary literature would not exist. The fact is that what the Anglo-Americans lump together under the term “modernism” was always known in France—and the rest of Europe, and Latin America—by a term that is equally vague: the avant-garde. To ignore this, to use the word “modernism” to apply exclusively to a movement in the English language that came thirty years later, is to show cultural arrogance, ethnocentrism, and historical insensitivity.”

….
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