POETICA : 6
20 Dec’ 20 Sun
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
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