This exchange reads as though people are battling over slogans -- make it
new vs. sound of sense. Pound vs. Frost -- tonight on the WWF...

From Pound's viewpoint, make it new was HIS translation from the chinese --
i think at core he was intrigued by the vision of the emperors bathtub and
the idea of burning old brush make something new -- phoenix in a person,
etc. It was an image for Pound, one to which he returned periodically as a
strong symbol of renewal. He wasn't playing with various interpretations of
the ENGLISH phrase Make it NEW or MAKE it new of make IT new, he was
recalling the image: a chinese emperor, a confucian, restoring himself,
focusing himself, re-energizing himself, an unwobbling pivot.

As for Frost, I have read Parini and Frost. Frost is unavoidably less
layered and referential and complicated than Pound, but that certainly does
not mean his poems are simplistic or his subjects "rural" while Pound is
"urbane." Seems to me both poets have their unavoidable place in 20th cent
lit. They bent it in their directions and led groups along with them,
sometimes with positive effect and sometimes with negative. certainly a
derivative Frostian poet is awful, but so is a Pound wannabe. Having said
all that, why the juxtaposition? Let the two poets lie -- they don't strike
me as polar opposites. They don't lend themselves to opposition as do, say,
Eliot and Williams.
--



> From: Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 21:14:33 -0600
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: "Make It New" was Re: cummings and Frost
>
> 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:
>> http://pages.zdnet.com/danpearl/danpearlman/
>>
>> My new fiction collection, THE BEST-KNOWN MAN IN THE WORLD AND OTHER
>> MISFITS, may be ordered online at http://www.aardwolfpress.com/
>> "Perfectly-crafted gems": Jack Dann, Nebula & World Fantasy Award winner
>>
>> Director, Council for the Literature of the Fantastic:
>> http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/
>>
>> OFFICE:
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>> University of Rhode Island
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