Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>
> I couldn't agree less. Frost's overriding idea of the sentence
> sound, "the sound of sense," though hardly as splashy as
> Pound's "Make It New," did much to undercut the genteel
> voice in early 20th-century American poetry. Each contributed
> greatly to changing the way poetry came to be written after
> their innovative early work.
> ==Dan
I forget whether we've discussed this before on the list or not. "Make
it new" is, I think, a rather more complicated slogan than might appear.
Make IT New. That is, the "it" remains the same: _Nothing_ new is
created but the old is renewed. To some extent I suppose all poets do
that ("What oft was thought but ne'er so well expresst"). In fact that's
what Frost seems to be doing in the poems that Randall Jarrell singled
out for praise in his essays on Frost.
But I think Pound was focused on making the old new, finding the life
that had been hidden in the rubble of time, in an especially distinctive
way:
. . ..Bracton,
Britten, Fleta on Glanville, must dig with my fingers
as nobody will lend me or sell me a pick axe.
Exercises my lungs, revives my spirits opens my pores
reading Tully on Cataline quickens my circulation
Canto 63
"as the sculptor sees the form in the air
before he sets hand to mallet,
"and as he sees the in, and the through,
the four sides
Canto 25
4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa
Gassir, Hooo Fasa dell' Italia tradita
now in the mind indestructible, Gassir, Hoooo Fasa,
Canto 74
And I would assume the same sort of thing is behind the title,
"Jefferson and/or Mussolini." "Make it New" echoes as it were "the
unwobbling pivot."
Carrol
>
> At 01:18 PM 03/13/2002 -0800, you wrote:
> >Dear Kate,
> >
> > ... Frost wasn't even worried
> >about a new idiom for poetry, he wasn't concerned with
> >that MAKE IT NEW motto (and that's why he got so upset
> >about Pound's review that said:"he paints the thing as
> >he sees it").
>
> Dan Pearlman's home page:
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>
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>
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>
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