THE CONCEPT OF THE LYRIC.

IMITATION, EXPRESSION AND

CREATION

There may be two basic ways in which one can conceive some definition of
poetry: 1. one may approach it from the standpoint of literary criticism and come up with
a scientific arid definition which may even discourage readers not very much
accustomed with the critical jargon; 2. one may view poetry from the perspective of a
reader who loves the experience of poetry itself and who feels alienated when one tries to
capture the mystery of poetry in the restrictive limits of a definition.
Literary critics and poeticians obviously prefer the former type of definition, as
they need to express their judgments in a very general, abstract manner that is supposed
to explain the mystery of poetry as a whole. Poets themselves, when they define poetry,
refer particularly to their own reading experiences, to their own interests and
idiosyncrasies. Here are examples of both these classes of definitions:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I
know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know
that it is poetry. Is there any other way? (E. Dickinson)

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (R. Frost)

Poetry is meant to replace the facile beauty of death by another beauty.

(V. Mayakovsky)

Poetry is an irrational eruption, the paranoic interpretation of reality.

(A. Breton)

Poetry is an utterance which is not heard, but overheard (J. Stuart Mill)
 The poetic activity is an adventure of the operating spirit that, by being its own
spectator at the same time, balances its own high poetic tension by meditating on
its own activity. (Hugo Friederich)

Poetry is a way of stretching the resources of language beyond their ordinary

power, in order to communicate what language seems unable to communicate.
(J. Korg)

The diverse ways in which poetry is defined proves the difficulty of the task and
even if we feel that each of them is right in some way, that each of them expresses a truth
that can stand on its own in many cases, we also feel unable to choose any one of them as
the complete, definitive description of poetry. As Jorge Luis Borges argues, the one who
attempts at explaining poetry is just like Saint Augustine facing the problem of time:
What is time? If nobody asks me, then I know. If they ask me, then I dont know.
Borges underlines here the intuitive nature of the understanding that is responsible for the
encounter with poetry and without which all theoretical statements become futile,
because if one does not grasp poetry intimately, emotionally, personally, if poetry does
not move that reader in any way, no mathematical definition will help him/her unlock the
gates leading to poetry. That is why Walt Whitman sounds most convincing when he says
that no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name of Poetry; nor
can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise
and disregard and overturn it.
Having taken into account that there must be a degree of skepticism in every
attempt at understanding and defining poetry, the students of literature should
nevertheless become aware of at least a number of issues that have been under critical
debate and that have been of considerable help in the analysis of poetry.
One of the first things to be mentioned about poetry is linked to its beginnings and
its historical evolution as a literary genre in itself. Aristotle mentions poetry in his
Poetics, but he does not mean it in the sense that we do nowadays. He thinks of it as epic
poetry, as different from the higher literary form of tragedy and from the lower forms of
comedy or satire. When he discusses Homer, he praises him because he knows his place
in the economy of his work, that is, he knows how to become invisible, how to disappear
behind his text and be a true imitator, instead of always affirming his individuality, the
latter alternative being something condemned by the philosopher in other writers. The
Aristotelian doctrine of mimesis came to dominate the field of literary criticism for
almost 18 centuries.
Yet during the 18th century, the classical conception of poetry as an imitation of a
feeling or of human actions is challenged and finally rejected, as other new ideas begin to
govern human thought and enterprise. The advent of pre-Romanticism in England and the
Romantic movement constituted a cultural environment in which the lyric genre could be
born as a separate genre, and could now form a triad together with the much older
dramatic and epic genres.
Etymologically, lyric comes from lyra, as in ancient times poetry was
accompanied by a song played on a lyre. The thinkers of the 18th century begin to
meditate on individuality and on a type of approach to reality that is opposite to the
former intellectual approach which took reason as its supreme basis. The philosophical
and artistic mutations throughout the 18th century lead to the consolidation of the notion
of the lyric, which is almost always equated with lyric motifs and with the idea of a
subject spontaneously and naturally expressing his most intimate feelings, fears,
emotional fluctuations. Previously, such literary productions had also existed, but they
had not been subsumed to any generic notion, as the category of the lyric had not yet
been invented. The names under which such poems had circulated varied from century to
century and from country to country: melikos, lyrikos (ancient Greece); carmina
(ancient Rome); canzoni (medieval Italy); carme (medieval France); ode, sonnet
(Renaissance).
G. B. Vico is one of the 18th century philosophers who, in his very influential
work, La Scienza nuova, argued that poetry has chronological priority over prose, since
humanity, at its primitive beginnings, could only think and express itself by means of a
mythopoetic imaginative activity. Even though he equates logica poetica with the logic
peculiar to the primitive stage of development of humanity, and considers that poetic is
synonymous with mythical, he is very important in that he explicitly and implicitly
contradicted the traditional doctrines about poetry (poetry as ornament and transmission
of intellectual truths, poetry as an object of pleasure, poetry as artifice, as ingenious, but
superfluous exercise). Poetic logic is given the primordial place in the development of
language, writing and thought: Vico considered that man, before he can integrate the
world in intellectual categories, he integrates it in emotional categories. Metaphor comes
before prose. Language and poetry are gradually seen to have an emotional origin. The
importance of individual perception considerably grows and the lyric is gradually
associated with sensitivity, emotive spontaneous language, passion, pathos.
These ideas are strengthened by the works of English empiricists, of the
physiologists of the French Enlightenment and those of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The great
English and German Romantics discover interior individuality, and the imaginative
powers of the spirit. Senzaia de libertate pe care o aduce cu sine aceast descoperire
este att de violent, c toate avatarurile poeziei postromantice i gsesc de fiecare
dat explicaia n ncercarea de a da individualitii un nou chip, o alt coeren, o
motivaie, un scop.(Crciun, 308) [This discovery brought about a sensation of freedom
that was so violent that all the avatars of postromantic poetry always find their
explanation in the attempt to give individuality a new face, a new coherence, a
motivation, a purpose.] However, individuality as a central notion in poetry was to last
only until the beginning of the 20th century, when the self as the center of discourse was
a notion that was questioned and even denied altogether.

Poetry as expression and communication

Towards the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century,
poetry comes to be synonymous with the category of the lyric. A doctrine of art as
expression now develops, on the basis of both previous theories and contemporary ones.
Longin, William Jones, Edmund Burke are some of those who played an important part
in the rejection of the ancient doctrine of art as imitation and in the establishing of a new
one: that of poetry as a powerful animated expression of human passions, of joy an pain,
of love and hate, of admiration and anger. (William Jones, apud Matei Calinescu, 24).
The lyric becomes the new poetic norm and the entire scale of values is reversed: what in
antiquity was seen as a sign of superiority (imitation) is now seen as a sign of inferiority.
These new changes in thought also produced theories that connected the three genres to
the three stage of human life. In this respect, Victor Hugo, in his Preface to Cromwell,
writes that Poetry has three ages, each of them corresponding to an age of society:...
primitive times are lyrical, ancient times are epic, and modern times are dramatic.
(Hugo, apud M. Calinescu, 29). Schopenhauer considers that the lyrical attitude is a
characteristic of youth, while the pleasure of telling stories is peculiar to old age. Ernest
Bovet, at the beginning of the 20th century, associates the lyrical with youth, the epic
with maturity and drama with old age. These associations are always debatable and imply
very subjective judgments on the part of their authors.
The chronological priority of the lyric is essentially important in the sense that it
eventually turned into aesthetic priority. The lyric is not only the origin of poetry, but
also its essence and finality. The other genres begin to be described as exterior to the
sphere of the poetic (see Calinescu, 30). The supremacy of the lyrical is thus established,
despite the fact the German idealist philosophers (Schopenhauer, Hegel) continued to
place poetry on a position that was inferior to prose and drama, as it was characterised by
a greater degree of subjectivity which subverted the rational trajectories of thought.
In England, at the beginning of the 19th century, the Romantic poets boldly
proclaimed that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth)
P. B. Shelley, in the same way, writes that Poetry is the record of the best and happiest
moments of the happiest and best minds... Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man. (A Defence of Poetry). The latter part of this quotation draws
attention to another view that concerns the nature of a poet. He is seen as an inspired
being, who is able to participate in the eternal, the infinite and the one, to unveil the
hidden beauty of the world and to make the others feel sweet sounds with which he
cheers his own solitude. The Romantic conception of poetry and the poet reminds one
of Platos dialogue, Ion, in which poets appear as inspired beings speaking only when
they are possessed by the divine power:
For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art,
but because they are inspired and possessed. they, like the bees, winging their
way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged
and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is
out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him they do not speak of them by
any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels
them, and that only; not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine.
Yet it was also the Romantic poets who underlined the role of imagination in the
creation of poetry. Among them, Coleridge particularly developed, in his Biographia
Literaria, a theory of artistic imagination, or second imagination (it was clearly
differentiated from primary imagination, which had a largely metaphysical meaning). He
made the famous distinction between fancy and properly creative imagination. The
former is based on memory, volition, association and choice: it is that aggregative and
associative power that is distinct from imagination or the shaping or modifying power.
This distinction continues the previous one between genius and talent: genius means
creation, organicity, spontaneity, intuition, while talent means ingenious reproduction,
associative mechanics, submission to the rules of reason. The concept of imagination is
closely knit with that of organicity, as Coleridge thinks that imagination ensures the
unity of the poetic work in which the parts and the whole are in a dialectical relation with
one another. The organic logic Coleridge inaugurates will be developed later by E. A.
Poe. For Coleridge, the logic of poetry is the logic of organic imagination which manages
to unify contraries and to harmonize indissolubly the parts and the whole.
The exaltation of imagination as a supreme human power will be followed,
towards the end of the 20th century, by such views as those belonging to Terry Eagleton,
who argues that imagination was a necessary advent in an age that was increasingly
governed by an ethic of selfish individualism and that this quirky, enigmatic, somewhat
fragile power was a form of compensation for our natural insensibility to one another.
He goes on to argue that acts of imagination are by no means always benign and that
there is nothing creative in itself about the imagination which launches wars as well as
volumes of poetry (Eagleton, 23-24). This is the postmodern relativization of concepts
whose borders are no longer stable, strong and dependable. Yet, the fact that imagination
also produces weapons meant to kill does not deny its quality of redeeming the human
heart. Imagination, in both its negative and positive aspects, is the only means we have to
push us forward, which does not mean that it is the only ingredient that turns a creative
product into a masterpiece.
If we go back now to the doctrine of poetry as expression, we can infer two main
functions of poetry, depending on what is expressed and communicated to the reader. On
the one hand, poetry had a communicative function, as it tended to reproduce the poets
emotion, by a sort of emotive contagion, into the readers soul (this is the psychological
view); on the other hand, poetry had a revelatory function, as it made its readers
perceive some superior inexpressible truth situated in the unknown essential zones of the
spirit. The latter function turns poetry into a means of knowledge superior to rational
means. German idealist philosophy adopted this latter view (Kant, Schelling, Fichte,
Herder); the philosopher can never discover what the poet can, and, as Novalis said,
poetry was considered the truth that the intellect cannot touch.

Poetry as craftsmanship
We have said that the Romantic view on poetry can be, to some extent, linked with
the Platonic image of the poet as an inspired being. This view is violently attacked and
rejected by Edgar Allan Poe, in his Philosophy of Composition (1846):
Most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they
compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would
 positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the
elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought.
He views the poet particularly as a maker completely aware of the creative process
that underlies the production of the poem. When he refers to his famous poem, The
Raven, he claims that
No one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition
that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision
and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.
He describes the choices he makes in terms of length, tone (melancholy), theme
(I designate Beauty as the province of the poem; the combination of beauty and sadness
the death of a young loved woman as the most melancholy themes of all), refrain
(Nevermore), sound, climax, locale and he also explains how the narrative of the poem
suddenly turns, towards the end, through metaphor, into a poetic rendering of mournful
and never-ending remembrance.
In his other essay, The Poetic Principle, he connects poetry to music and defines it
as the rhythmical creation of beauty. The logic of the creative process is completely
rational, but its finality is to provide a purely spiritual experience. If the poet searches
lucidly, pathetically to achieve poetic state, poetry does not express, but creates Beauty.
The function of poetry is no longer to communicate or establish an emotional communion
or even to transmit some knowledge, but to display its own process of creation as tension,
as an ascending movement towards the objective and inaccessible absolute. The poet
must work language so as it may be able to suggest this absolute.
Poe initiates a trend in poetic thought according to which poetry is the effect of
linguistic transformations, or a spectacle of language, and which will later lead to
symbolism, to the avant-garde and futurist, surrealist movements, to the so difficult
postmodern poetry that sometimes almost cares nothing for the reader who wants to see it
as a transmission of a comprehensible message. Perhaps the message of postmodern
poetry is that poetry exists for its own sake, as a game of language that should be enjoyed
as such and whose semantic effects depend on contextual, subjective and changing
perspectives.
 POETIC I AND ITS MASKS. POETIC MEANING

The poetic I / voice

The poetic I should not be confounded with its poetic voices / masks/ veils/
avatars/ personae. It represents that textual entity who generates a certain poetic discourse
and whose identity is mainly of a linguistic nature. It is only a paper being, a being
created in and through language, living in the text as a grammatical character.
Catherine Fromilhague stresses the fact that the I of lyrical discourse is
une image poetise, aussi distincte du moi de lauteur que le tu des apostrophes
en posie lest de nimporte quel allocutaire precisment identifiable une
construction qui rsulte dune exprience personnelle transforme en acte
essentiel. Le caractre essentiel de cette instance est particulirement marqu dans
la forme de ladresse au lecteur. (a poeticized image, as distinct from the I of the
author as the you of apostrophes in poetry is from any precisely identifiable co-
locutor a construct which results from the transformation of personal
experiences into essential acts.)
This transformation of personal experience into essential act, we think, entails the
circumscribing, the touching of that deep, pure self which is at the origin of a particular
poetical discourse.
This self which produces the discourse does not appear explicitly in the text, it is
manifested through the masks /avatars /veils /personas it chooses to wear, through the
way of structuring visions /images, through the voices it adopts in order to communicate
itself. As compared to its masks, the poetic I is much more stable, although we could
not speak of an identity established once and for all. The poetic self assumes its
provisional identities according to the purposes it might have at one moment or another.
This I also changes, evolves, and we might trace its evolution and attempt to define it
by studying its masks, their relationships with one another, the types of relationships
created, their recurrence or disappearance, their hierarchy. (e. g. self/voice in Great
Expectations; in Lady Lazarus; in The Raven; in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock;
Caesar and Cleopatra).

I. A. Richards, the father of New Criticism in America distinguished in The

Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), between two types of language: the referential
language of science and the emotive language of poetry. His main idea is that we may
either use words for the sake of the references they promote, or we may use them for the
sake of attitudes and emotions which ensue. Further, the scientific use of language is
concerned with correctness of reference and with logical connections and relations of
references to one another, while in poetry logical arrangement is not necessary (Essays,
112)
This is linked with his semantic perspective on language, derived from the
behaviourist psychological theory of Pavlov and Watson. Together with Ogden, he
designed a Triangle of Interpretation (The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with C. K.
Ogden in 1923):
Idea (reference) [unicorn]
Image (significance)

direct, reciprocal, code

reversible rel.

Symbol (word) indirect, Referent (real object)

signified questionable, signified
unicorn arbitrary, often absent rel. ?

Poetry is very little concerned with the right part of the triangle, what interests
poets is the relationship established between the two extremes of the left part. The link
between idea (the signified) and the referent is shortcircuited in favour of the one
between the signifier (word, symbol) and the signified (idea, notion).
This happens because the priorities and functions of poetry are of a different
nature. Throughout time, the functions of poetry have varied greatly:

To imitate nature in producing similar effects (classical Greece)

To express and communicate the emotions of the poet (Romanticism)
To create beauty through the working out of a special rhythm meant to
reach the essence of humanity (Poe)
To present things instead of describing them (Yeats, Imagism)
To recuperate a lost mythic language
To return to the origins of language in order to purify it and to resuscitate it,
to save it from its deadness
To suggest things, to create allusions (Symbolism)
To realize the secret true correspondences among the things of the world
(Baudelaire)
To set imagination free from any constraints whatsoever
To react against any sort of dogmas
To revolt against language itself (avant-garde, anti-poetry)
To scandalize, to oppose conventionality, common sense, to unsettle order
(Futurism, Dada, Surrealism)
The characteristic traits of the poetic self result from these views on poetry,
adopted by various poets or poetic schools: melancholy, wonder, anger,
despair, revolt, destructiveness are but a few of the psychological states
expressed or created in poetic texts.
 Poetic syntax
Syntax (syn + taxis = putting together) is not simple juxtaposition. There is not
only a horizontal syntax, but also one on the vertical (rhyme syntax included here). The
poetical use of syntax is translated in fact into a fight against syntax, especially against
the inflexibility of English syntax. Syntax should be linked with Mukarovskys notion of
dynamic semantics (the meanings given by the various possibilities of combination
among words), which is different from that of static semantics (the meanings words have
when taken in isolation). The meanings of words are coloured by the meanings of the
words with which they are related in a poetic text, either horizontally or (especially)
vertically. (Shakespeare: Dawn in russet mantle clad; Sylvia Plath: a walking
miracle; worms like sticky pearls).
The possible effects of using syntax for poetic purposes are already obvious: to
slow down our movement from one word to the next and thus to intensify our perception
of the individual words, to create ambiguities, to reorganize meanings. (Avadanei, 70)
John Cage: endless combinations of the same number of words.
e. e. cummings: destroying correlations altogether:

Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didnt he danced his did.
(Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town)
Edwin Morgan: paratextual elements have to be associated with breaking syntax:
Message Clear.
 POETIC LANGUAGE & POETIC DISCOURSE

The relationship between language and discourse corresponds to the linguistic

distinction between langue and parole, that is, between the abstract system of rules
governing the construction of sentences/texts and the concrete realization of this system
in a given text, either oral or written, produced by a speaker/writer. Language is the
means by which we produce texts. Texts become spaces of discourse manifestation. In a
given text one or more discourses can become manifest. The elements which transform a
text into a discourse are:
1. The presence of a subject and of an object/addressee whose identities are
signaled by deictic elements (deixis pronouns, verb tenses, modalisation);
2. The intention to persuade the listener/audience/public/other to do something;
social finality;
3. Different types of argumentative strategies meant to manipulate the other;
3. The attitude of the subject towards the facts he uses and towards the audience;
4. A certain cultural episteme/model on which the attitude and the strategies of the
speaker are based.
Poetic discourse is that discourse which is produced by a poetic I (who is different
from the biographical, real self of the writer/speaker) whose main objective is to create a
text organized according to certain artistic rules, through which to communicate complex
messages of an aesthetic nature to a reader/receiver, by means of poetic language. The
criteria by which we identify a language as poetic have varied along centuries, according
to the cultural paradigms which have dominated societies at one time or another.
According to Jan Mukarovsky, poetic language interferes with the other strata of
language, while it opposes them through its intrinsic aesthetic finality. He speaks of the
aesthetic function, which means that attention is concentrated on the linguistic sign.
In the same way, Roman Jakobson establishes that one of the six communication
functions of a discourse (referential, poetic, emotive self expression, conative
imperative addressing of receiver, phatic checking channel working, metalingual
checking code working) is the poetic function, and it is associated with one of the
corresponding six dimensions of the communication process the message. In poetry the
dominant function is the poetic function, as the focus is on the message itself. In
Jakobsons terms, poetry results from the projection of the paradigmatic axis on the
syntagmatic axis. (i. e. poetry successfully combines form and function) [I like Ike
political slogan] (Jakobson's theory of communicative functions was first published in
"Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics", in: Thomas A. Sebeok, Style In Language,
Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, p. 350-377)
Poetic language has been mostly defined by opposition to the language of prose.
The two have one element in common: their fictional character, but they differ from two
other points of view:
1. The lyrical dimension (subjective enunciation, problematic identity of the
subject, no external referent, no representational function);
2. The formal dimension (versification) (R. Zafiu)
I. A. Richards, the father of New Criticism in America distinguished in The
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), between two types of language: the referential
language of science and the emotive language of poetry. His main idea is that we may
either use words for the sake of the references they promote, or we may use them for the
sake of attitudes and emotions which ensue. Further, the scientific use of language is
concerned with correctness of reference and with logical connections and relations of
references to one another, while in poetry logical arrangement is not necessary (Essays,
112)
What makes a text poetic?
1. The way in which it uses language: stylistics
2. The literary conventions it is based on: prosody, intertextuality, imaginary
content, expression.
Language is the material of poetry, but linguistic analysis is not enough for us to
define the specificity of poetry. Poetry uses the linguistic microstructures in order to build
its own macrostructure. There is no definitive criterion which could be used to separate
poetic texts from non-poetic or poetic texts. Jakobson argues that the frontier between
the poetic and the non-poetic is extremely unstable. There is nothing in poetry which did
not exist before in language, and, on the other hand, there is nothing in language which
could automatically create poetry (Manolescu, 17). Jakobsons analogy: poeticity is a
textual component which transforms the text in the same way in which oil transforms the
entire taste of a dish. Yet poeticity is not something anterior to the poem, it is intrinsic to
it. We must follow the other way: from the poem to the language, from the poetic
macrostructure to the linguistic microstructures. It is poetry that makes poeticity, and not
language. Although it uses linguistic structures, poetry cannot be reduced to them.
Poetry is a different type of communication which is based on two stages:
1. The poet works on the language, transforming it, emphasizing certain traits and
destroying others, according to his/her intention/view/taste (the deconstructive stage).
2. The poet uses the elements obtained through the preliminary transformations in
the poem (the constructive stage).
The relation between language and poetry is a very complex one, because they do
not coincide with each other and poetry cannot exist outside language. On the other hand,
natural language has always been felt by poets, especially by the modern poets, to be
insufficient. Poets, profoundly dissatisfied with their maternal tongue, have tried to invent
their own language. As Mallarm said, poets repair the fault of languages (cf. Genette,
Figuri, 232, M:19). This fault of language is the fact that the linguistic sign is not
motivated (the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign). In Roland Barthess terms, the poet
wants language to imitate ideas.
There are several operations poets could perform in order to motivate linguistic
signs:
1. the use of mimetic properties of language (onomatopoeia and other imitative
strategies)
- Genette: mimologisms: words, groups of words, sentences, discourses that
imitate the objects they refer to, and not other idioms (Palimpsestes, 87);
 - the relation between the phonetic aspect of the word and its meaning is
reconstructed; attention is redirected: from meaning to form; repetition of the same word
until its meaning is loosened or annihilated; treating a word as if it were an object
(Acolo - / Flfind n locul psrii / cuvntul pasre se ou n aer, Doina); creation of
words that only suggest meaning, half-words;
2. Grammatical deviations
- changing morphological traits of the words (e. g. feminine forms used as
masculine or the other way round); conversion (he danced his didnt); syntactical
deviations (ellipsis, tautology, parallelism);
3. Tropes
- all the figures of speech are intended to generate the metaphorical process
- tropes are situated on the semantic level: the poet manipulates language in order
to create new meanings; he changes language so that it should affect the word; metaphor
does not belong only to the word, but also to the sentence. Not only words are
metaphorical, but also entire sentences can be metaphorical.
- metaphor is not enough to create a poetic text; poetry and poetic language do not
coincide; there are needed literary codes and conventions which refer not only to the
semantic dimension, but also to how metaphorical meaning is used. (I am a miracle / A
walking miracle)
The construction of metaphors is subordinated to the cultural codes of the age to
which the poet belongs. It is not the alteration of metaphor which modifies poetry, but it
is the alteration of poetry, as a sum of viewpoints and as literary practice, which modifies
the type of metaphor.
Traditional poetry and modern poetry display different types of metaphor:
1. The distance between the two terms of the metaphor (the tenor and the vehicle)
is greater in the modern poetry; in traditional poetry, it is closer to simile/comparison.
Yet, as Hugo Friedrich notes, modern poetry undergoes a profound transformation: the
elements supposedly comparable are in fact completely alien to each other. The modern
metaphor is no longer based on the logical relation between its elements, but on the
alogical, even absurd, connection of terms that are semantically unrelated. Analogy no
longer defines metaphor, it is replaced by the absurd. To understand modern metaphors
has become a very difficult activity, since they force words to acquire meanings that do
not belong to them at all. Linguistic criteria are never enough to check whether a
metaphor is or is not successful.
2. Traditional poets prefer topical metaphors, while modern poets favour
atopical metaphors. Topical metaphors are in fact symbols or allegories that are based
on a mythology or, generally, on a collective tradition. Atopical metaphors are metaphors
that can only be understood contextually, they cannot be used irrespective of their
contexts. The former are relatively stable, they make use of a previous analogy, while the
latter are not preceded by any other analogy or symbol, they belong entirely to a certain
poet, they are original in the highest degree.
Nevertheless, metaphor and poetic language cannot be said to be one and the same
thing. Poetry is not an effect of the poeticizing of natural language. A poem is not simply
a language more expressive, more coloured, more picturesque than ordinary language, it
is language which has become a literary work.
Poetic language is not ordinary language to which there are added figures of
speech and stylistic devices, it is something more than this. Perhaps the poem itself can
be conceived of as a sui-generis figure: Clinescu has defined metaphor as a small poem.
M. C. Beardsley, like Clinescu, defined metaphor as a poem in miniature. By
reversing the equation, we could call the poem an extended metaphor.
Michael Riffaterre, in Smiotique de la posie, describes the poem as a verbal
structure which generates its meaning in the same way in which a metaphor produces its
meaning. He considers that poetry expresses meanings in an oblique manner. A poem
tells us one thing and signifies another thing. This obliquity is created through semantic
deviations, syntactical distortions (ambiguity, contradiction, non-sense) and prosody
(creation of meaning rhymes, symmetries etc.). Poetry is inseparable from the concept
of the text. It should be considered a finite, closed entity. Obliquity alters, distorts or even
annuls the representational function of poetic language, its mimesis. Poetry does not send
to a real referent, it creates its own referent. The poem does not send to a reality outside
it, nor can we say that it is non-referential: it is self-referential. Its words, phrases,
sentences can be representational, but poeticity is a function of the poetic text.
To decipher a poem we need a double reading: an euristic reading (the tracing of
meanings) and a hermeneutic reading (retroactive; it recuperates the already known
elements and establishes significances; literary competences are needed).
 POETRY AND FORM. THE GRAPHICS OF POETRY

The first and most obvious feature that distinguishes poetry from the narrative
discourse is its different layout on the page. This layout is more or less surprising,
depending on how much meaning the poet wants to connect with the graphic shape of the
poem. Sometimes, the graphic shape of the poem acquires special meanings and the
message of the poem could not be apprehended if this layout is not also taken into
account. e. e. cummings is one of the poets famous for the use of this special type of
relation between the words as they are arranged on the page and the message they are
meant to transmit:
In the worlds literature, Guillaume Apollinaire is acknowledged as the creator of
the so-called calligrammes (the volume was published in 1918). These were poems
with shapes that tried to express the message in a visual way. The poem Il pleut, for
example, was printed with letters trickling down the page like tears. Before him,
Rabelais had done something comparable with his epilenie: a song in honour of Bacchus
printed in the shape of a bottle (cf. Cuddon)
Altar poems (carmen figuratum Lat. shaped poem): a poem in which the
verses or stanzas are so arranged that they form a design on the page and take the shape
of the subject of the poem. the device is believed to have been first used by Persian poets
and was revived during the Renaissance period.
Concrete poetry - a recent development of the altar poem. the object is to present
each poem as a different shape. It is thus a matter of pictorial typography which produces
visual poetry. Other further developments and refinements are emergent poetry
(which involves cryptographic tricks with letters), semiotic poetry (use of symbols),
kinetic poetry (the movement of the poem depends on the careful placement and
programming of words or letters line by line or page by page in order to achieve a visual
pattern) and logograms. Also, pattern poetry; eye-poetry (it depends totally on visual
appeal); [ear-poetry] (Phil Roberts)
Dylan Thomas, Vision and Prayer:

Who
Are you
Who is born
In the next room
So loud to my own
That I can hear the womb
Opening and the dark run
Over the ghost and the dropped son
Behind the wall thin as a wrens bone?
In the birth bloody room unknown
To the burn and turn of time
And the heart print of man
Bows no baptism
But dark alone
Blessing on
The wild
Child
e. e. cummings

l (a

le
af
fa

ll

s)

one

iness

Aural effects. Euphony

Euphony as such means the pleasing effect of the sound of words, almost
necessarily involving reading aloud, recitation, oral interpretation. (Avdanei). It is that
dimension which creates the musicality of the poem. (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Raven, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night).
The acoustic components of the language are: sounds, intonation, breathing force,
timbre and rhythm. Sounds are the real foundations of euphony:
Repetitions of sounds: assonance, alliteration, consonance (harmony);
Rhyme schemes: the abstract pattern of end-rhymes in a stanza;
 o exact/full/perfect rhyme (identity of the last stressed vowel: smiling/filing);
o slant (rhyme that is not true; also half/near rhyme; deliberate or
incompetent: other/powder);
o end rhyme (monorhyme, couplets, triplets);
o internal (within a line or other unit; between the word preceding the caesura
and the end-word: I met a man with a skin of tan);
o single-rhyme (cat/dog/bat/sheep);
o cross-rhyme (cat/dog/bat/frog);
o arch-rhyme (cat/dog/frog/bat);
o external (between successive lines);
o masculine (stressed: smile/file);
o feminine (unstressed: smiling/filing);
o eye rhyme (or printers rhyme; non-rhyming homographic endings:
cough/dough).
Rhyme is used, by the good poets to create powerful semantic relations.
Intonation part of speech; punctuation marks the musical scores of poetry; it is
influenced by the typographical patternings of modern poetry
Timbre something peculiar to one poet or another only in so far a s we listen to
him reading his own poems; it may also be reproduced by an actor or te reader himself,
according to the various indications referring to the identity of the speaker and the
peculiarities of the voice
Rhythm (Greek, flowing) closely connected to meter; it is given by the
recurrence of stresses and pauses; the movement or sense of movement communicated
by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables and by the duration of the
syllables. In verse, rhythm depends on the metrical pattern and it is regular. (Cuddon)
Ezra Pound said that the rhythm of a poem must have meaning. It is the first sign
that what we hear is poetry, and, furthermore, cultural conditioning makes us hear
duplets [roses] as steady, triplets [violets] as fast-moving or light-hearted, rigid
adherence to a regular metre as monotonous, stretches of lines ending with end-stoped
singlets as heavy, and so forth (Roberts, 34)
Meter (Greek, measure): the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables; based
on stress; a line may have a fixed number of syllables and yet have a varying number of
stresses; the most common meters in English: iambic; trochaic; anapestic; dactylic;
spondaic; the basic unit of meter is the foot; the metrical patterns are given by line
lengths or number of feet (mono-, di-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, hexa-, hepta-, octa meter).
English poetry is characterized by a specific type of meter, called accentual, and it is
given not by the number of feet, but by the number of accents/stresses. This is the so-
called sprung rhythm: the equivalence of two lines in a poem is ensured by the same
number of main stresses, irrespective of the difference in the number of syllables.
Chaucer was the one who made the five-stress line his standard, in Troilus and
Criseyde, and in the verse parts of The Canterbury Tales. This became the basic line of
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and many others. Yet this meter does not
belong to the majority of English speakers. In popular poetry the most common pattern is
the four-stress one.
Refrains create a more general rhythmic pattern; the similitude is not only
between lines, but between stanzas or sections. This device is most specific to ballads
(folk/literary ballads, protest songs).
Prosody is the study or science of versification and every aspect of it. it includes
meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanza forms.
Free verse: it has no regular meter or line length and depends on natural speech
rhythms and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables. It was used by Walt
Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, William
Carlos Williams.
Blank verse: it consists of unrhymed five-stress lines; properly, iambic
pentameters. It is the most widely used of English verse forms and is the one closest to
the rhythms of everyday English speech; used by Shakespeare; particularly favoured by
dramatists; also used by the Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge).
 Modernity tried to destroy the rigours of prosody, but it turned out that the rigours
of free verse are no freer that the ones before. If the poet has to adapt his rhythm to his
mood, this may become very restrictive in terms of prosody. W. C. Williams meant, for
instance, that his three line stanzas be read so that each line occupy the same amount as
the others, lineation marking thus the isochronous units.
Types of poems according to form
Meters and rhymes are the two things we have to take into account if we want to
identify types of stanzas: couplets (aa); quatrains (aabb, abab interlaced rhyme, abba
closed quatrain); tercets (axa, bxb, aaa-very difficult); terza rima (aba bcb cdc). The
most natural to the English language are the couplets and the quatrains.
Couplets, quatrains and tercets are the basic form of all open-ended poetry in
English. Around Chaucers time, interest began to develop in larger and more complex
stanza forms, the so-called fixed forms, in which the smaller forms combine into larger
groups using a set rhyme-scheme. (Roberts, 90-1)
The oldest of these forms is the carol, a song mainly linked with Christmas, but
this is a recent sense. Originally, it came from the French term caroler, to dance in a ring.
It involves a leader singing and a chorus/participants. Typical rhyme scheme: aaab (the
leader) bb (the chorus/burden). It is similar to ottava rima, royal rhyme and the
Spenserian stanza, only the latter ones use the more sophisticated five-stress line.
The rondel is one of the forms favoured by Chaucer and other poets of his day.
Poetic forms beginning with rond are linked to the rondo forms of classical music.
What these forms have in common is that they continually circle back to material first
presented in their opening lines. The rondel has 14 lines and 2 rhymes throughout,
repeating 2 of the opening lines halfway through, and closing with a repetition of the
poems first 3 lines. The rondeau is similar, but has 10 or 13 lines.
The ballade is another medieval form using patterns of line repetition: 8-line
stanzas, rhymed ababbcbc, with the same line appearing at the end of each stanza, as a
kind of chorus. The villanelle 5 tercets and a concluding quatrain, returning to 1 or
more lines which function as a kind of burden/chorus. All these forms come from
medieval French song-and-dance forms. Use of these forms nowadays may have the
effect of turning the readers attention away from the other aspects of the poem. skilful
rhymes are no longer enough.
The sonnet is often referred to as the king of English verse. The English form: 3
quatrains and a couplet. It was different from the original Italian form. Modern poets
have used it, sometimes departing from traditional models to develop their own unique
forms: John Crowe Ransom (Two Gentlemen in Bonds), Edna St Vincent Millay (Sonnets
from an Ungrafted Tree), Dylan Thomas (Altar-wise by Owl-light), W. H. Auden
(Sonnets from China), John Berryman (Berrymans Sonnets) and Robert Lowell
(Notebooks).
The limerick a particularly English form, invented by Edward Lear, a Victorian;
a 5-line stanza, rhymed aabba.
All I want is to speak simply, for this grace I pray (George Seferis, a greek poet
of the 20th century)
 UNDERSTANDING POETRY: MODELS OF INTERPRETATION

1. A formalist model: New Criticism

It was an exclusively English and American tradition; it established itself as a
critical orthodoxy in the English departments in the United States in the 1940s 50s
Representatives: I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism 1929; Coleridge on
Imagination 1934); F. R. Leavis (New Bearings in English Poetry 1932; Revaluation
1936;); Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren (Understanding Poetry 1938)
Principles according to which a poem should be both created and analyzed:
The poem is not feeling, the ideal, truth, revelation, the sense of infinitude, or
some mysterious je ne sais quoi, but it is an organization of meanings and as such
can be rationally analyzed.
Reading is the process of obtaining the total meaning of the poem; reading
is having a mental experience that approximately resembles the relevant mental
experience of the poet as he contemplates the finished poem. (Perkins, 78).
Knowledge about the age in which the author lived is not usually necessary. What
they were interested in was the particular text, which was to be analyzed closely
and objectively, not in an impressionist way.
The greater the amount of diverse, relevant experience and feeling that is present
and organized, the greater the contact with reality; good poems embody such
states of mind, that is why their language must be polysemous through metaphor,
irony, paradox, ambiguity and their total form will combine the multiple
perspectives into a complex yet coherent pattern.
A poem should always be treated as an organic system of relationships (Brooks,
Penn Warrren, apud Perkins, 78).
Concentration on the language of the text, seeking to bring all its relevant
meanings and their interplay into consciousness (the so-called explication).
 Meaning should not be studied only lexically, but also the ranges of meaning
implicated in form and style, that is, in figures, syntax, rhythm, versification.
They adhered to Coleridges premise of organic form: the form is not external and
separable from the meaning, but further defines it.
Their ultimate object of evaluation, on which the worth of the text finally
depended: the speakers state of mind, the extent to which he was in contact with
reality at all relevant points. Did the text embody a mature awareness, a many-
sided, complex, yet integrated attitude and vision?
The presence of a persona (impersonality); the poem should have a curve or
plot enacted, it should be complex, organized in stanzas, rhymed, metrical,
tightly integrated in images and figures (formality, intellectuality, self-conscious
control); difficult, compressed, implied an elite audience.

2. A semantic model: Group A Rhetoric of Poetry

According to Group , reading is a dynamic search for unity of meaning. Reading
is completed by the re-reading of the text. The first reading is linear, while the second is
rather spatial. The main concepts are those of isotopy and alotopy.
Isotopy is essentially manifested through recurrence (of semes, of syntactical
structures, of various types of relations, of sounds etc.). The reader has to identify the
main isotopy of a text by using his intuition and by studying the lexical webs of relations
organized around a basic concept.
Isotopy (izo + topos = the same topic); it ensures the unity of a text, its coherence.
They establish a triadic model for the semantic analysis of poems:
 Logos (language)

Anthropos (man) Cosmos (universe)

Logos all the manifestations of the function of communication (including

mythical beings, literary characters, works of art etc.)
Cosmos everything that exists outside humanity and particularly outside
consciousness.
It is not possible to find objective criteria in order to prove, in each case, that a
semantic series belongs to one of the three fundamental categories. We have to take into
account the cultural aspects, models that are inculcated in our minds through education.
The opposition anthropos / cosmos can be found at the basis of many cultural
codes and it generates the aesthetic ideology of poetry. It may be translated into such
oppositions as: micro / macrocosm; nature / culture; life / death; subject / object; space /
time. Either man is integrated in the universe or the universe is transformed into a
subjective representation.
The poetic effect results from two main things:
1. The direct or indirect manifestation of an isotopy belonging to the idea of
Anthropos and of an isotopy belonging to that of Cosmos.
2. A rhetorical mediation, either explicit or implicit, between the two isotopies.
(referential mediation, discursive mediation, rhetorical mediation).
The highest degree of poeticity is attained when isotopies are not present, but
completely superposed, when one isotopy can be read in another isotopy. The best poems
are those in which oppositions are strongest. The fundamental opposition in a poem may
be accompanied by other weaker oppositions.
 When the isotopy of the Logos is introduced in the semantic scheme, mediation is
diminished, endangered. An effect of isolation and rupture is brought about when the
poem becomes a linguistic object, something fictitious, fabricated, when it no longer
sends to a story, no longer connects to a real referent. The modern poem is separated
from the world and becomes the model of a different harmonious one.
Stages of interpretation:
1. identifying isotopies
2. searching for recurrent items that have in common a number of semes
3. searching for alosemies
4. re-evaluating and mediation between isotopies / alotopies
5. rhetorical isotopies
6. syntactical structure
 T. S. ELIOT AND EZRA POUND: THE MODERNIST PARADIGM IN
POETRY

T. S. Eliot (1888 1965)

The future development of poetry did not proceed from Eliot, but both from and
against him, and in both respects he was central., argues David Perkins, who studies the
amazingly lasting influence the Eliot exercised in the first five decades of the 20th
century. (Perkins, 3) Many other poets and critics acknowledged this: for more than
three decades before the Second World War you could scarcely pick up a poem by a
young writer without overhearing Eliot somewhere in the background in the twenties
and thirties one had to follow Eliot in order to win a reputation or an audience. (Stanley
Kunitz, apud Perkins, 4)
What T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound initiated was a modernist era in poetry whose
fundamental features were constituted by its elliptic nature, formalism, cosmopolitanism,
academicism, from which American poetry recovered only in the 1950s and 1960s.
They relied to an extensive degree on the former traditions of the French symbolism and
of the still older one of the Metaphysical poets of the 18th century. Such qualities,
abundantly characteristic of Eliots poetry, made him into a great antagonist to Whitman,
even if his Four Quartets is full of Whitman. And this is why the resurgence of Pound,
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens was one important factor in the reaction
against Eliot, as they represented the counter-current to his classicist academic poetry.
He was followed by a large group of poets and critics, who eventually formed a
school that became dominant in the American universities in the third and fourth decades
of the 20th century: New Criticism (whose main theses were the close reading or
explication of poems, the organic interconnection of images, formal meters and stanzas,
packed wit, and an academic style).
One event in Eliots religious life was marked by his conversion to Anglicanism,
which largely influences his verse through the recurrent theme of the struggle for belief
and faith and through the saturation of his later poetry with the rhythms of Anglican
liturgy which he attended assiduously.
The Waste Land (1922)
- the modern mind saturated with history, possessing incongruous elements from
different cultures in the past but no unified culture of its own (Perkins, 14); the
fascination of the modern intellectual with myths; dramatization of the weakened will to
live in the modern world; it showed that poetry could be written in the absence of all
possible belief (I. A. Richards)
During the 20s he advocated classicism in opposition to the modern world,
which he saw as Romantic; he argued that emotion is naturally disordered and must be
disciplined. External authority is necessary. Order is a principal ideal, and is to be
achieved through intellectual awareness and control. (Perkins, 17)
The Hollow Men (1925) seemed to continue from The Waste Land; similar
methods of allusion and juxtaposition; similar mood it begins with a collective death in
life and ends with a mocking representation of the world going to break down
- as different from The Waste Land, it lacks fragments of dramatic scenes and
passages of extended narration
- abstract style in the manner of symbolists; images are precise but their meanings
and emotional effects are complex and incompletely determinable; the effect is
that of vagueness combined with rich music
Ash Wednesday (1930) makes the former poem appear different, as the beginning
of something new that was continued with Ash Wednesday a much more explicit
religiousness, the possibility of salvation is affirmed
- the first major poem after his religious conversion; brilliant repetition of lines with
variation of their terminal points, allegorical imagery, mannered repetitions,
internal rhymes; the experimenting with personal expression, and emotional
directness, an emotion he disapproves of and struggles against
- religious emotion, he stressed, not only contains, but also revives the erotic one;
erotic love is never happy in his poetry, it is distasteful, rejected, frustrated, or a
 refused temptation; he can only rejoice erotic love when it becomes a transfigured
element in a religious experience and symbol; suffering is accepted because it is
associated with a religious meaning, and hope and prayer help change the mood of
the poem from that of The Waste Land
Four Quartets: the greatest long poem yet written in English in the 20th century
(Perkins, 24); uneven, many contrived pieces, magnificent pieces, formal procedures that
compensate for local inadequacies of imagination and phrasing; the poem combines
concentrated meaning with direct emotional force; inexhaustible symbolism and
paradoxes
- personal speech, personal memory, continuous and discursive, less mythical, less
socially critical than The Waste Land; metaphysical exploration: the lonely mind
of the poet attempting to read ultimate mysteries
- the return to the language of reflection and generalization in which most people
think; themes and symbols in keeping with the Romantic conventions of the 19th
century; also the culmination of 20th century symbolism: denotation compromised
through contradiction, vagueness, ambiguity, incomplete grammar, logical
failures, paradox
- numerous leitmotifs: images, symbols (darkness, traveling, dancing, roses, fire),
conceptual terms (end, beginning, motion, stillness, word, pattern), themes (the
conception of time and patterns, the relation between intense moments to the
indifferent time surrounding them, psychological depression and religious
darkness, fear of old age and death)
- integration through cross-reference (echoing), increment, reprise
- the concept of pattern: cyclic pattern repeated in several images or contexts;
pattern as the link to the spiritual and eternal; sometimes associated with moral and
spiritual striving (words cracking and breaking); the desire not to desire; the search
for meaning in experience by indentifying patterns, and thus opposing the
incoherence of the world
- major theme: life in time in relation to the eternal; different conceptions of time
(linear sequence, cyclic, infinite plane like the ocean); time is only valuable in
relation to eternity, and the eternal is incarnated within the realm of time in rare
moments whose significance and quality can be felt, but not understood (the
episode in the rose garden)
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917)
- the central themes of the Eliotian poetics; the impersonal character of emotion and
of its communication; the poetic act unites deliberate, conscious factors with
undeliberate, unconscious factors:
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and
deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be
conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors
tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but
an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an
escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality
and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
- the fundamental concept of tradition, which is not only inherited, but most of all
has to be conquered; it is connected with the historical spirit which permits one to
be connected to the whole tradition before him and to be also a part of ones own
time, since literary time is circular, and not linear, like proper historical time; a
poet needs to develop his consciousness of the past if he wants to modify the past
through the newness of his poetry:
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and
if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first
place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to
anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and
the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not
merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the
 whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the
literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order.
- the relations between tradition and the poetic self is situated under the paradigm of
depersonalization:
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
Eliot establishes an analogy between chemical processes and poetic creation: the
mind of the poet appears as a sort of catalyst which makes possible the incarnation of
meanings:
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously
mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form
sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is
present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum,
and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral,
and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly
or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the
more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man
who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind
digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
He differentiates between biographical emotions and poetic emotions and states
the poet must produce complex artistic emotions which may or may not be based on the
empirical emotions of his own life
- The theory of the objective correlative (1919 Hamlet and His Problems) reminds
us of Pounds equations for human emotions; emotion has to be evoked, not
expressed, by means of a formula that provides the reader with a sensorial
experience generated by the set of objects or the situation or the chain of events
rendered by the author:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
"objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that
when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
 Ezra Pound (1885 1972)
- an American mostly living in Europe (England, France, Italy); met Eliot in 1914
- 1912 1913: Imagism the hard, precise, objective presentation of fact in a type
of language that only differed from ordinary speech through a heightened intensity
Imagism (1912), Poetry magazine, Chicago; H. D., Richard Aldington; the term
is used for the first time by Pound in the note accompanying five short poems of T. E.
Hulme, published in 1912; deep connection to the French symbolism, but going beyond it
- the poetics of imagism and that of symbolism are distinguished in that imagism
constructs a primordially visual poetics (as different from the primordially musical
poetics of the symbolists), which is against description; its key-concept is that of
presentation
- the main ideas of Imagism are to be found in a few essays Pound published
between 1913 and 1918: A Retrospect, included in Pavannes et Divisions (1918):
In the spring or early summer of 1912, 'H.D.', Richard Aldington and
myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:
1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,
not in sequence of a metronome.
The basic concept is that of image, which is tightly connected with the idea of
presentation:
An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in
an instant of time. I use the term 'complex' rather technical sense employed
by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we may not agree
absolutely in our application.
It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives that
sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space
limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of
 the greatest works of art. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than
to produce voluminous works.
- presentation is opposed to description (Shakespeares dawn in russet mantle
clad); it must be precise, concrete, close to life, hard, vital
- literature is language loaded with signification (ABC of Reading); it creates
durable interest: literature is news that stays news.; poetry is the science of
loading language with signification, of energizing language; he identifies three
modalities corresponding to three types of poetry:
MELOPOEIA (words are charged over and above their plain meaning,
with some musical property, which directs the bearing or the trend of that
meaning)
PHANOPOEIA (a casting of images upon the visual imagination)
LOGOPOEIA (the dance of the intellect among words, which are used not
only for their direct meaning, but makes use of habits of usage, various
contexts, known acceptances, irony; this kind of poetry holds an aesthetic
content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot
be possibly contained in plastic or in music. (How to Read, apud Matei
Calinescu, 120)
- among these, only the second is translatable; Pounds ideal was closest to this
(phanopoeia); fundamentally opposed to Mallarme, because the latter was
interested in the annihilation of the communicative function of words, while Pound
wanted to intensify this function of language (that of making things present to
consciousness); poetic language is not separated from common langauge, but it is
more intense, more complex, more meaningful; true poetry is born out of spoken
language
- polyphonic vision on poetic language; self-consciousness; multilinguistic nature;
the role of the context; many styles
- more radically modernist styles in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920), early Cantos
- campaigning for Eliot and Joyce, editing The Waste Land, translator of Confucius,
sympathizer of Fascism, after the Second World War, imprisoned as a traitor in a
concentration camp at Pisa, where he was confined in a wire cage: there he created
the Pisan Cantos
- after 1920, he composed almost no poetry that was to be a part of his Cantos a
poem about 23 thousand lines long (109 poems), a huge variety of spaces, times,
languages, tones, free verse
- concrete presentations always fragmentary; this was motivated by his belief that
the world is incoherent and our data are always incomplete. The event is a
complex whole, but only snatches, aspects and bits come to our knowledge:
All knowledge is built up from a rain of factual atoms Real knowledge
goes into natural man in titbits. A scrap here, a scrap there; always
pertinent, linked to safety, or nutrition or pleasure. Human curiosity
survives and is catered for, by the twopenny weeklies, 24 lines on
chromosomes, six lines on a three-headed calf. (Pound, apud Perkins, 225)
- the fragments are synecdoches, they evoke the whole context from which they
originally were part of
- he prefers allusion to generalisation, and allusion help set up a system of
interrelation between the poems context and other contexts
- elision, ignorance of grammatical conventions, discontinuous, disruptive and
disorienting transitions from one fragment to another: the pieces remain discrete,
even if when juxtaposed they form a system of relations: this contrasts with the
Romantic convention of organic growth, of spontaneous flow
- each style that rapidly follows another style implicitly criticizes the fomer, that is
also persent
- the need to find some convention to explain and legitimate his discontinuities, both
to himself and to his readers: there are two such conventions operating in the
 Cantos the ideogram (impersonal construction by juxtaposition) and the interior
flow of consciousness (creating a persona as speaker or central consciousness)
- the ideogram was a sort of objective presentation; inspired by Ernest Fenollosas
manuscript, Essay on the Chinese Written Character; both visual and spatial; the
component images interact simultaneously to present a complex of meaning; he
advocated the ideogram as a way of thinking, too, but there is at least one
argument that subverts it: while it claims to eliminate abstraction, an
unacknowledged abstraction stands at the first step, determining which cases are
relevant for the presentation
- incremental repetition: one passage refers us back or forward to another, usually to
several others; readers must reassemble the fragments as they read; events may
enter into various wholes; interpretation depends on contexts
- no pattern, no form, no plot, no structure: order is supposed to result at the end, out
of the numerous things presented (the classifications of biology serve as a
metaphor)
- the Pisan Cantos: Pound as central character: myhtologizing his experience,
objectifying it, putting the most intense personal feelings at a distance;
omnipresent irony; the poem is not to be read as the natural voice of the poet ( a lot
of quotations in foreign languages)
- the Pisan Cantos must be read both as ideogram and as interior monologue: he
created himself as the consciousness operating the associations and expressing
itself at the same time