Ulysses James Joyce

1
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• In the 1920s and 1930s there was a
  significant change in the conception of literary
  theory and criticism. Thanks to figures such as
  T.S. Eliot, I. A. Richards and his disciples F.
  R. Leavis and William Empson, the last remnants
  of the Victorian vision of literature were swept
  away.
• However, this innovation flowering in the 1920s
  and the 1930s had already been prepared before
  the First World War (1914-1918) in the form of
  manifestoes and controversial position statements
  by such authors and critics as Ezra Pound, T. E.
  Hulme, and Wyndham Lewis. The three of them
  qualify to be studied under the label of
  Avant-Garde poetics.

2
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• Many movements endeavoured to supersede the
  Victorian literary ideology in the early years of
  the 20th century, but two of them are noteworthy,
  Imagism and Vorticism
• Imagism born in 1912, Ezra Pound himself
  formulated its programme in colaboration with
  Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and
  others. It is a revolt against Romanticism and
  promoted a new type of poem characterized by (a)
  being short, (b) being composed of short lines of
  musical cadence rather than metrical regularity,
  (c) avoiding abstraction and thus treating the
  poetic object with hard, clear precision rather
  than with symbolic technique.
• Imagism is obviously based on the idea of image,
  a kind of salvation for poetry which for decades
  had been the victim of verbal pomposity and
  excess. Therefore, the poet must evoke visual
  images devoid of rhetoric and verbal inflation,
  an activity which requires precise observation of
  the poetic object and the use of similes,
  metaphors, and analogies.

3
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• Vorticism a few years later (about 1914),
  Vorticism appeared, though it enjoyed a
  remarkably ephimeral existence. Ezra Pound and
  Wyndham Lewis also participated in its birth. Its
  short-lived review Blast The Review of the Great
  English Vortex was edited by Lewis and began
  publication in 1914.
• Vorticism is an aggressive literary and artistic
  movement, whose ideal is to supply dynamism and
  movement to poetical images. It attacks the
  sentimentality of 19th- century art and
  celebrates violence, energy, and the machine. In
  painting, for instance, Vorticism was expressed
  in abstract compositions of bold lines, sharp
  angles, and planes, remote from the organic,
  smooth, rounded forms that can be found in nature.

4
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

5
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

6
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

7
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

8
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
• Both from a personal and from a literary angle,
  Ezra Pound possesses all necessary traits to
  become a first-rate innovator. One only needs to
  look as his critical writings and realize how
  unconventional and idiosyncratic they are in
  contrast with the critical works previously
  studied, whether they belong to the Symbolists,
  to the academic critics, or to the Bloomsburians.
• Despite the fact that he wrote much criticism,
  however peculiar, he considered that, with
  reference to literary creation, literary
  criticism only had a very secondary value
• The value of criticism in proportion to actual
  making is less than one to one hundred. The only
  critical formulations that rise above this level
  are the specifications made by artists who later
  put them into practice and achieve demonstration.

9
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• Some principles of Ezra Pounds literary
  criticism
• For Pound, literary criticism has two essential
  functions (a) a priori, to serve as a
  theoretical guide to create good literary
  works (b) a posteriori, to determine which
  literary works are good and which bad. Of
  course, he never speaks about what he considers a
  "good" or a "bad" literary work. This remains
  entirely in the realm of the subjective and the
  personal In the end the critic can only say I
  like it, or I am moved, or something of that
  sort.
• Certainly, his critical writings are no more than
  recipes and indications for young contemporary
  poets to begin writing, though many of them serve
  the second function, i.e. to point out, suggest,
  warn, select what is worth reading and what
  should be rejected, always from an entirely
  subjective point of view. Pound's critical spirit
  was entirely that of a teacher and of an
  anthologist.

10
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics
Owing to his lack of objective standards of
criticism, it comes as no surprise that Pound
opposed academic criticism, much more reflective
and cautious than his sharp remarks disguised as
literary criticism. This is his opinion of
academic critics The only really vicious
criticism is the academic criticism of those who
. . . refuse to say what they think, if they do
think, and who quote accepted opinions these men
are the vermin, their treachery to the work of
the past is as great as that of the false artist
to the present.
11
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics
Areas of indifference or hostility (a)
againts the history of criticism (b) against
the biographical approaches to an author's work
(by way of contemptuous parody, he calls
wash lists these approaches) (c) his method of
analysis is absolutely a-historical he does
not believe that the passage of time can in any
way affect the consideration of a literary
work Examples Poetry is
always the same, the changes are superficial
What we need is a literary scholarship
which will weigh Theocritus and Yeats
with one balance All ages are
contemporary
12
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics
Pound's idea of literature is decidedly
cosmopolitan and universal. He always refers to
his notion of Weltliteratur, precisely with a
German term to push home his ideas. Pound
demands a universal standard which pays no
attention to time or countrya
Weltliteraturstandard. His inclination to
internationalize literature explains his great
interest in translation and translators, to
whom he devoted many essays and particularly
strove to unearth unimportant Elizabethan
translators or early translations of Homer into
Latinthough he had in him small Latine and
lesse Greeke.
13
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• Pounds literary theory his poetics
• His unequivocal rejection of superfluous verbal
  rhetoric, his inclination for representational
  precision, and his liking for musical rhythms in
  place of artificial metrics. These are his three
  famous principles
• Direct treatment of the thing' whether
  subjective or objective.
• To use absolutely no word that does not
  contribute to the presentation.
• As regarding rhythm to compose in the
  sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
  sequence of a metronome.

14
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics

• His definition of image and his relations with
  Imagism
• An Image' is that which presents an
  intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
  of time.Examples of Imagist poetry
• 1 In the Station of the Metro
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd,
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• 2 Where thy bodice laces start
• As ivy fingers clutching through
• Its crevices.
• There is, however, a contradiction in this
  definition insistence on visual precision of
  images, but use of mental concepts rather than
  visual ones emotion and intellect.

15
Lesson 4 Ezra Pound and the English Avant-Garde
Poetics
He offers a three-part classification of
poetry Melopoeia it is the kind of poetry in
which the musical sense predominates, wherein
the words are charged, over and above their plain
meaning, with some musical property, which
directs the bearing or trend of that meaning. He
categorically maintains that poets who are not
interested in music are, or become, bad
poets. Phanopoeia it is another way to refer
to the images of a poem. It means definiteness of
presentation, not mere description, which is a
casting of images upon the visual
imagination. Logopoeia he defines this type
of poetry by means of a metaphor which is very
difficult to understand or explain the dance of
the intellect among words. It emphasizes the
role of the intellect in the composition of
poetry and, additionally, the contextual
modification of the meaning of words according to
the surrounding medium.