POETICA : 6                        

20 Dec’ 20  Sun                  

 

Poem of the Week

By Ezra Pound*

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

Theme

Poetry and Image

 

It’s a big change from the emphasis on traditional devices of poetry like rhyme, stanza forms, metrical variations, to the modernist trend of rhymeless, punctuationless, ‘free form’ verse, often looking like or even presented as written prose. We saw some of these in our weekly quotes of modernist poems.

 

We are talking more of modernist poetry because it is closer to the spirit of our times. It has broken free from all the imposed devices of rhyme, stanza forms, regular metres – following a form and shape more akin to our spontaneous and free form of poetry. It is a kind of free verse becoming freer and more malleable in accordance with the freedom of the individual.  The only discipline it adheres to is its poetic value. It must be pure, unshackled poetry, coming out naturally in its own distinctive form, with any amount of experiment of various linguistic kinds, that can give appropriate shape to its individual form – with its own musicality.

 

All the traditional properties of poetry are still there, and most poetry everywhere is being written more or less in the same traditional modes. But the modernist trends in variations have their own justification in freeing poetry from its formal bonds, and making the writing of poetry more spontaneous. The only important thing is that in its created form it must contain all the poetry with its unadulterated essentiality.

 

We shall pause for a moment and look at the two weekly poems – the one in our last discussion (‘May’) and the present one (‘Metro’) by Pound. But first the poem ‘May’ by Galassi. We see a pattern: there are seemingly 4 stanzas of identical shape – two and a half lines each. The first 2 are regular sentences with initial capitals and stops. Stanza 3, however, flows into 4 and stops with line 10. And the rest of the last stanza is another sentence of one and half line. Capitals and punctuation have been used everywhere as in regular sentences, with normal syntactical form, except in the very last ‘is and is not’. The line-arrangement gives it a poetic form, though without rhymes. What is striking on a second view or reading is the ‘word music’ – particularly in these words : back/apple, sad so soon/look , tree/week, used-up/duster, out and up and down/sun, pool/loamy, mulch/touch, rank/rut and rot, and more – month/month, is/is/is. In traditional prosody it uses devices like alliteraratio, assonance, internal rhyme, etc. Also, it uses conventional syntax with interwoven ‘word music’ which creates a subtler music than the jingle of rhymes.

 

The other striking feature is the poet’s string of imagery of a spring scene with an apple tree, an ivy plant and a pool, much like Tennyson. It is almost like a painting with vivid imagery. The apple tree getting sad, the ivy by the pool sending red feelers to find the sun, and brewing mulch, clogging the pool. The reader can have a physical sense of these changes taking place with the gradual change of the season – the sad apple tree, the red-feelers of the ivy plant, the pool clogging with mulch. The poem creates a mood by the pool side in the May month. It’s quite like Keats or Tennyson, and yet on a different key because of its modernism, creating a mood of gloominess. That is poetry at the boundary of modernism; with a beautiful weave of music and visual imagery.

 

Pound’s poem is a shocker with only two interfused images of the mundane (railway station) and the natural (wet petals), presented most curtly, making a striking poem in one moment of poetic perception. It gives no overt message. The poem is a truncated sentence with no verb (action- word) or syntactical finish (initial capital and stop). That only signifies that moments are internalized in experience, not in syntactical completeness, but in vivid striking images, often static (with no action or motion). Pound himself defines an image as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, which would exactly define this poem. The length of a poem is always determined by the span of a poetic experience. It can consist of a single image (interfused as here) to a whole episode of a complex experience comprising of a whole  elongated sequence of emotional experience, like Pound’s longer poems, for instance, the epic Cantos.

 

If we read poetry being written today, we find the hesitancy, uncertainties, rootlessness, the existential despair, the cultural mishmash and the loss of identity in modern life being reflected both in the form and content of poetry, more often than not. This mood of forlornness and despondency is seen in almost every poem we have quoted so far. In the poem (P-4) by Williams’ it appears as shining ‘broken pieces of a green bottle’, thrown on waste ash (‘cinders’) behind a hospital building (totally un-romantic). In Galassi’s poem (P-5), we find things ‘sad’ and ‘cruel’. In Cummings, we find the brokenness reflected in the orthography itself.

 

Poetry today looks more like the image of ‘broken pieces of a green bottle’. It does not lend itself to order and  symmetry – rhyme and punctuation being discarded reluctantly as not in sync with a world turned largely into a waste land populated  with ‘hollow men’. And this frustration is shown in experimental modernist poetry in different ways. The emphasis now has shifted from symmetrically well-formed poems - adorned with stanza arrangement and rhyme, etc - giving clear and curt messages; whatever be the theme, romantic or didactic. It is as if the poet is no longer interested in, or listless about, the flower blooming and swaying on its branch; instead, he is focusing on the flower  torn from the branch and lying on the earthy floor destined to decompose – as an image reflecting the hollowness of modern life.

 

Imagist poetry may have been a modernist movement – comprising of a small group of poets led by Ezra Pound -  focusing on the importance of the ‘image’ in poetry, but it has most certainly changed the face of modern poetry from a romantic view of life to a realistic, and often surrealistic view of existence. What is important to understand is that it is the zeitgeist (cultural spirit) of an age that brings about changes in the form and content of art. Twentieth century (post-World Wars) brought about such a change in the world cultural ethos where the perfection of the whole became a part of tradition, and a focus on the broken parts came to be the norm of modernism; and the image became its signature motif.

 

What does all this mean to us – poets of today, in our community? First, rhyme – unless it comes by itself, even without any set pattern – need not be a constraint; though there’s no ban against it. Old poetic forms – particularly, the sonnet (which we may also discuss in this sequence; because much of the best English poetry is enshrined in it) – may be used once in a while as a sport. Orthographic experimentation like Cummings’ has remained an exception even in world poetry, and may be tried sparingly, only after its technical aspects are well-understood. Use of initial capitals and dropping of punctuation as a syntactical obligation may remain optional. Good lineation, helping in good semantics (meaning-management) must have top preference. Internal word-music also must remain among the most desirable devices to be used. But most important of all is the use of imagery – metaphorically or symbolically, which raises the quality of the poem to a higher level.

 

We shall have more to say about what ‘imagery’ does in poetry, by touching upon the idea of symbolism to a limited extent  - in ‘Poetry and Imagery’-II, next Sunday.

 

© Dr BSM Murty

Photos : Courtsey Google  Sculpture of Ezra Pound by Henri Gaudie-Brzeska, 1914

 

* Ezra Pound [1885-1972], whose 14-word poem is the quote of this week, “is more responsible (said T S Eliot) for the 20th-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual”. Another American critic said of Pound: “The least that can be claimed of his poetry is that for over 50 years he was one of the three or four best poets writing in English”. Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, who spent the major part of his life in Europe and was the most influential literary figure in modernist English poetry. He was the founder and namer of the Imagist group of poets, including Hilada Dolittle, Richard Aldington and William Carlos Williams, among a few others. And we shall have a closer peep into Imagism in our next discussion – something of great relevance to us as poets world-wide today. Ref. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound