Form and Content

JB said,

>with one exception, I've pretty much had my say on the issue.  your focus
>on
>Pound has, thus far, been exclusively negative, ignoring, as carlo parcelli
>has pointed out, the significance of his poetical method

I must confess that I find it difficult to discuss the "form" of Pound's
work entirely apart from its content.   A number of peope on this list
express interest in, and a high regard for, Pound's "formal" or technical
acheivements.  I am not uninterested in that question, but I find it easier
to comprehend formal innovations in poetry when they are analyzed relative
to innovations in the structure of other art forms.  Let's take music,
especially absolute music, symphonic music, for instance.  Thus could anyone
suggest a comparison between Pound's form and the forms adopted by 20th
composers?  For example, the innovations during the imagist period have
their analogy in the new musical forms and harmonies created by Debussy and
Ravel.  The futurist and the vorticist phase of Pound's work has its analogy
the primitivist and machine music of early Prokofiev (The Age of Steel, the
Second Symphony, and the Scythian Suite), Honneger (Pacific 231, and
Symphony No. Four), and Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring).  [In this school we
might put Antheil's opera, "Transatlantique" which Pound heard on the day he
briefly met Frobenius].

When it comes to the middle and later phase Pound's work I am somewhat at a
loss to make an appropriate comparison.  We cannot say that Pound's
innovations in form resemble Schoenberg's serialism and twelve-tone row
system, because that would be a purely formal innovation, almost apart from
mood and emotional effect (and furthermore, the emotional effect of twelve
tone system---such as it is--- is totally unlike the effect of Pound's later
work, is it not?)  Nor can we say that Pound is in any real sense a
neo-classicist in form, like the later Stravinsky; or a neo-romantic like
the mid to late Shostakovich, or late Prokofiev (Inspite of Pound's interest
in incorporating traditional materials into his works, they do not give us
the same effect aesthetically as say Stravinsky's use of the baroque
materials borrowed from Pergolesi and incorporated into "Pulcinella.")

Something in the developed "ideogrammatic method" of Pound suggests to me
the musical technique of Olivier Messiaen (and to some degree, Pierre
Boulez), whose modern works have been described as "the piling of columns of
sound upon columns of sound."   There is in Messiaen a sort of effusion of
color and a dynamic variety which comes from sheer exuberance, without
inviting that chaotic.  This may be comparable to Pound.

I ask for such analogies because only in music is the form totally supreme
over the content, and only in absolute  music is the form totally divorced
from any verbal message, linguistic construct, or easily identifiable
meaning.

Ultimately, I don't think the meaning of Pound's work (its content, if you
will) is separable from the form.  That is, one can discuss the form, and
one can discuss the content, but ultimately, to understand the poetry, both
have to be discussed in relation {It may that in Dada, and in Finnegans
Wake, we can discuss form and content separately, or even ignore the
question of meaning and content altogether---but Pound was clearly not
moving in that direction.  He wanted his words to signify something]

Wei


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