Friday, March 17, 2006

Week 3: Pound and Provence

'Cino' and 'Na Audiart' as examples of Pound's working with Provencal themes and modes; and 'Near Perigord' as the great poem of his early years. Req'd reading: Eliot's "Tradtion and the Individual Talent".

Response to "Tradtion and the Individual Talent":


Essence of the image (an intellectual and emotional complex)

Pound - 'The Spirit of Romance': spirit of lyricism, religious sensibility, awakened in Provence, then to Italy (Petrarch, Dante etc...). The sonnet rose out of Provence.

Pound saw the lyric tradition as being reawoken in Provence->Italy, then Northern Europe and Elizabethan England (then disappearing). He wanted to reawaken the tradition, as a living force.

[Cantos - the vision destroyed, then reasserted.] Again cf The Waste Land - poetic engagement with the notion of tradition.

Writers with a tradition: Eliot/ Pound/ Joyce/ Beckett.

Joyce: myth as a structured force, cf the Provencal tradition.

[/Modernism - Transcendentalism without God] -> something of transcendental mysticism.

Eliot/Pound: spirit of literature/ tradtion (in place of spirit of God)

Pound: "Make it new" best of the present/ best of the past.


"Na Audiart": Troubadour "clus" (trobar clus): a poetic style composed of complex metrics, intricate rhymes, and words chosen more for their sound than for their meaning.

"fashion" / "pass I on" - wit underlining reverence and love

cf "When you are old, under the candellight" ... you will regret...
- the tragedy of age // preciousness of beauty and youth

i.) Phanopoeia: light (visual imagination)
ii.) Melopoeia: sweet (lyrical/ musical imagination)
iii.) Logopoeia: word (illusions and cultures created through words)


"Near Perigord": Think - what is the motivation of Bertrans? Enigma... Come back to this.
The riddle of the love poem - cf Canto 28 of the Inferno (Bertrans into Hell and severed head) = source (borrowings)

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