kristen stevens writes:
Date: Tuesday, March 14, 2000 8:06 PM
 
>Would it be intentional incoherence?  A rootless portion of a poem
>alluding to a tale with no meaning to Pound (or to meaning in a tale
>with no value to Pound)...I'd like to hear more comparisons of Pound
>and Eliot's neo-Homeric epics.
 
kristen,
    ep's usage, i take it,  is in dead earnest, no?
e.g. he saw in the bk 11 descent among the shades,
a metafor for his own project
...ie returning to the tradition and once again giving it voice,
bringing it into the vital air
...which is fine
...but the suggestion is that in the larger sense his odyssey's
a spurious reading...kinda  picaresque,  like don juan?
 
and the suggestion from this particular is that also
therefore, like byron, for all the brilliance,
technical and other, he remains  minor
for never having pushed his stuff to a grande coherence,
theme or mythos?
 
as opposed to say eliot's mystical/metaphysical
meditations on being and time,  "fire and the rose".
 
eliot's wasteland is a series of tableaux in symbolist style
depicting a radical personal and cultural dissolution
...with the medieval romance of the dessicated kingdom the
metafor for the west...and hisself the kinda woody allen
anti-hero percival, etc....and like woody he proceeds
thenceforth to chew the cud of his despair.
 
still the radical nihilism of the times did present art
with a specially thorny problem...
what with neitzsche's declaring god dead,
and spengler putting payed to western art
...yeats sought a theme, and sought for it in vain
...and dada-ism
...so indeed the times are post-structuralist
...and there may well be a post structural thesis here;
but not, i think, from ep's chosing it.
...and from here, i'm afraid,  one starts sounding french.
 
but, anyway, aside from the few allusions,
don't really see anything homeric in eliot.
have i misunderstood you?
please give me your ideas.
 
thanks,
bob