Formalism from Pound
Apr. 24th, 2005 04:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mirrorshardhttp://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/apr05/yezzi.htm
Unfortunately, few poets today understand prosody as well as Eliot and Pound. (Take Pound’s Canzoni for example or Eliot’s version of terza rima in Four Quartets). No doubt they were reacting strongly against traditional prosody as practiced by the Victorians and Edwardians, but they were also capable of writing in the very forms that they reviled. Pound wrote a poem, which he withdrew from his Canzoni, entitled “Against Form”:
Unfortunately, few poets today understand prosody as well as Eliot and Pound. (Take Pound’s Canzoni for example or Eliot’s version of terza rima in Four Quartets). No doubt they were reacting strongly against traditional prosody as practiced by the Victorians and Edwardians, but they were also capable of writing in the very forms that they reviled. Pound wrote a poem, which he withdrew from his Canzoni, entitled “Against Form”:
Whether my Lady will to hear of me
The unrimed speech wherein the heart is heard,
Or whether she prefer to the perfumed word
And powdered cheek of masking irony?
Decorous dance steps are simplicity,
The well-groomed sonnet is to truth preferred;
Let us be all things so we’re not absurd,
Dabble with forms and damn the verity.
Bardlets and bardkins, I do bite my thumb.
Corset the muse and “directoire” her grace,
Marcel the elf-looks of sa chevelure,
Enamel Melpomene’s too sun-kissed face
And then to have your fame forged doubly sure
Let taste rule all and bid the heart be dumb.
