If EzP is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and
promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry, I wonder what that “aesthetic”
is?  Is it a complex layering of images?  If we consider his influence by
way of the Imagists we can say that he promoted clarity, precision, and
economy of language.  He also flipped his finger traditional rhyme and
meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the
musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."  Is this Pounds
major contribution to poetry?  Now, if I may go on, Pound also was in a
sense a master of allusion, which we could say was a continuation of what
I’ll call Classical style.  Like Plato he criticized the systemization of
words according to a predefined formula.  He’s different from Plato
because I wonder if he had any concern for the ‘truth.’  Is he like Plato
in respect to the fact that speech should match the ‘soul’ of the speaker
and the audience (let’s assume truth to be a relative concept for the
moment?)  We can say that Plato was concerned with the issue of
communicability.  As you know EzP and Eliot were ‘masters’ of classical
allusion, which to the contemporary listener lacks communicability.  Can
we say that EzP taught himself how to read and write differently from the
ways advocated by past cultures and educational institutions, but he never
escaped the style(s_ he inherited or we came to associate with him.  He
must have picked through classical and contemporary texts, read them,
internalized them in ways that was meaningful to him, gave them a
uniqueness, and continued--like Emerson, Whiteman, Sandburg—to define an
American nation and culture, different from Europe, but also integrating
an Eastern gestalt. He blew the horn for uniqueness, as Emerson first
did—“make it new” became the mantra.  Although he blew the horn he never
escaped from Classical allusive references.  To the modern reader these
types of allusions, because most readers are not well grounded in
classical texts, are incomprehensible, and ‘incommunicable.”  To the
younger generation not schooled in classical texts his work is difficult
and they want to turn away from him, like they turn away from Dryden.

Now we might teach young people "In a Station of the Metro"

              The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
              Petals on a wet, black bough.

because of the complex image--"apparition", and the metaphor.  Wow, what
economy!  We might teach the Cantos, better yet, parts thereof, for the
complex experimentation of language and line.  Experimentation interests
contemporary students.

Berstein said in a message on the LISTSERVE, “Poetics”: “If one starts
with the assumption that a poetry should be truthful or beautiful, that
it's meaning should transcend the circumstances of its production -- then
of course talk of the politics of Pound's poetic forms will seem
dismissive of Pound's work, since it pulls that work down from the heights
of poetic vanity into the real-politics of the actual poem in actual
history."  My comment is, "Okay, so where is the the poetics if all we
have is a politics."  I think that Berstein's point is illustrated by the
fact that this LISTSERVE is often caught up in issues of "Pound Politics"
rather than his poetics.  He does have a poetics as I have started to
describe above.  Pound is not, I submit, a great or even a good poet.
Emerson wasn't either, but both of these individuals were leaders in
defining a national literature and culture.  We must teach them both to
the younger generation for this reason.

A note on Dryden.  Coleridge and Eliot killed Dryden because of his over
sentimentality and reliance on tradition, his disconnection of thought and
feeling, and finally because of his heavy reliance on classical
stylistics.


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