November 19, 2004
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From Tate to Plato
In honor of Allen Tate‘s birthday (today)
and of the MoMA re-opening (tomorrow)
“For Allen Tate the concept of tension was the
most useful formal tool at the critic’s disposal, as irony and paradox were
for Brooks. The principle of tension sustains the whole structure of meaning,
and, as Tate declares in Tension
in Poetry (1938), he derives it from lopping the prefixes off the
logical terms extension
and intension
(which define the abstract and denotative aspect of the poetic language and,
respectively, the concrete and connotative one). The meaning of the poem is
‘the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can
find in it.’ There
is an infinite line between extreme extension and extreme intension and the
readers select the meaning at the point they wish along that line, according
to their personal drives, interests or approaches. Thus the Platonist will tend
to stay near the extension end, for he is more interested in deriving an abstraction
of the object into a universal….”– from
Form, Structure, and Structurality,
by Radu Surdulescu“Eliot, in a
conception comparable to Wallace Stevens’ ‘Anecdote of the Jar,’ has suggested how art
conquers time:Only by the form,
the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.”in The Achievement of T.S. Eliot,
Oxford University Press, 1958
From Writing Chinese Characters:
“It is practical to think of a character centered within an imaginary square grid….
The grid can… be… subdivided, usually to 9 or 16 squares….”
These “Chinese jars”
(as opposed to their contents)
are as follows:
Various previous Log24.net entries have
dealt with the 3×3 “form” or “pattern”
(to use the terms of T. S. Eliot).For the 4×4 form, see Poetry’s Bones
and Geometry of the 4×4 Square.
