Free College Essays - Aesthetic Form of Cantos and The Waste Land :: free essay writer

Cantos and The Waste Land esthetic Form in Modern Poetry In the Cantos and The Waste Land, it is clear that a radical transformation was taking place in aesthetic structure but this transformation has been touched on only peripherally by innovational critics. R. P. Blackmur comes closest to the central problem while analyzing what he calls Pounds anecdotal method. The special form of the Cantos, Blackmur explains, is that of the anecdote begun in bingle place, taken up in one or more other places, and finished, if at all, in still another. This deliberate disconnectedness, this art of a thing continually alluding to itself, continually breaking off short, is the method by which the Cantos tie themselves together. So soon as the readers mind is concerted with the cloth of the poem, Mr. Pound deliberately disconcerts it, either by introducing fresh and disjunct material or by reverting to old and, apparently, equally disjunct material. Blackmurs remarks apply equally well to The W aste Land, where syntactical sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between disconnected word-groups. To be properly understood, these word-groups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously. Only when this is do can they be adequately grasped for, while they follow one another in time, their meaning does not depend on this temporal relationship. The one difficulty of these poems, which no amount of textual exegesis can wholly overcome, is the internal conflict between the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of the nature of poetry. Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the readers attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something wrong the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the social organisation of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be understand as a unity. It would not be difficult to trace this conception of poetic form