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

Cantos and The Waste Land artistic Form in Modern Poetry In the Cantos and The Waste Land, it is chiseled that a radical transformation was taking place in aesthetic social structure but this transformation has been touched on only peripherally by modern font 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 ane place, taken up in one or more other places, and finished, if at all, in still other. 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 material 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 c ome up to The Waste Land, where syntactical age is given up for a structure depending on the lore of relationships between disconnected word-groups. To be properly understood, these word-groups must(prenominal) 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 familiar conflict between the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern cosmos 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 election reference of any word-group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by th e simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to for each one other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and neighboring(a) reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction 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 apprehended as a unity. It would not be difficult to trace this conception of poetical form