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 ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com