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Subject:
From:
Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
- Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 25 Dec 2001 10:53:17 -0500
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Epic demands that exposition be subordinated to dramatic human action. The
epic poet can make extensive use of speeches and narrative, killing the
birds of exposition and character revelation with one stone. In offering
the poet the freedom to put words into the mouths of characters and into
the mouth of an omniscient narrator, the genre gives the poet the tools
necessary to expound a theme and to create a drama.  Within those narrative
limitations, the modern epic poet might well be able to create a dramatic
narrative that showed how statistical probabilities have come to affect the
quality of life as lived by the man in the street. But the audience ought
not be expected to have --or be willing to acquire-- an actuary's knowledge
in order to understand that theme. There is rarely if ever a need for any
abstruse technicality, raw and undigested, itself to become the subject
matter of the poem; when that happens, the artist is not making a poem but
passing an owl-pellet.
Tim Romano

Carlo Parcelli wrote:

>[...]
>Nash's work is tremendously influential and has broad application. Nash's work
>along with Heisenberg's, Bohr's, Pitts' (another good melodrama) and
>McCulloch's, Watson's and Crick's, von Neumann's, Turing's, Weiner's,
>Shannon's
>and dozens of others forms the theoretical and practical bedrock of our daily
>lives. Can the consumer of 'epics' only explore this as melodrama, ghosted
>forces that make self-interest possible, or in simple allegories of good and
>evil? If not through the Cantos, Maximus, "A" etc., how else would such an
>ambitious and risky poetics proceed? Carlo Parcelli

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