January 19, 2007

  • Art Wars at The New Criterion:

    Triple Kiss

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    I bent to kiss the lovely Maid,
    And found a threefold kiss return’d.
    -- "The Crystal Cabinet"

    The above illustration of a classic Blake verse is
    for Anthony Daniels, a critic of Ezra Pound. The illustration may
    appeal to Daniels, since it is, like the persona presented by Daniels himself, petit-bourgeois and vulgar.

    It was inspired by today's two previous entries and by Daniels's remarks, in this month's New Criterion magazine, on Ezra Pound:

    "Of his poetry I shall say
    nothing: not being fluent in Greek, Chinese, Italian, Farsi,
    and so forth, I do not feel much qualified to comment on it....
    I shall merely confess to a petit-bourgeois partiality for
    comprehensibility and to what Pound himself called, in the
    nearest he ever came to a mea culpa with regard to his own
    ferocious anti-Semitism at a time of genocide, 'a vulgar
    suburban prejudice' against those who suppose that their
    thoughts are so profound that they justify a lifetime of
    exegesis if ever their meaning is to be even so much as
    glimpsed through a glass darkly."

    -- "Pound's Depreciation"

    Daniels, here posing as a vulgar suburban petit-bourgeois, is unwilling
    to examine Pound's poetry even "through a glass darkly."  This
    echoes the petit-bourgeois, but not vulgar,  "confession" of
    today's previous entry:

    "I didn't expect much--didn't look out the window
    At school more diligent than able--docile stable"

    -- "A Life," by Zbigniew Herbert

    Pound, editor of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"-- published in the first issue of the original Criterion magazine in 1922-- might refer Daniels to the ghost of Guy Davenport:

    "'The architectonics of a narrative,' Davenport says, 'are emphasized
    and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become
    Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a
    hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol
    comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all
    the meaning in.'....

    In his study of The Cantos, Davenport defines the Poundian ideogram
    as 'a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols, rather than a grammar of
    logical sequence.... An idea unifies, dominates, and controls the
    particulars that make the ideogram'.... He insists on the
    intelligibility of this method: 'The components of an ideogram cohere
    as particles in a magnetic field, independent of each other but not of
    the pattern in which they figure.'"

    -- Andre Furlani, "'When Novelists Become Cubists': The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport"

    Related material:

    A remark
    on form and pattern
    by T. S. Eliot
    (friend of Pound
    and founder of
    the original
    Criterion magazine)