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

Cantos and The Waste Land Aesthetic Form in new-fangled Poetry In the Cantos and The Waste Land, it is clear that a radical variation was taking place in aesthetic structure but this regeneration has been touched on only peripherally by modern critics. R. P. Blackmur comes close to the central problem while analyzing what he calls Pounds anecdotal method. The special mildew of the Cantos, Blackmur explains, is that of the anecdote begun in peerless place, taken up in bingle 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 withdraw short, is the method by which the Cantos tie themselves together. So soon as the readers beware is concerted with the material of the poem, Mr. Pound deliberately disconcerts it, either by introducing unfermented and disjunct material or by reverting to old and, apparently, every bit disjunct material. Blackmurs remarks appl y equally well to The Waste Land, where syntactical grade is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships among disconnected word-groups. To be properly understood, these word-groups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously. Only when this is done 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 tot of textual exegesis can wholly overcome, is the inhering conflict between the time-logic of nomenclature and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of the nature of poetry. Aesthetic get in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic that demands a land up reorientation in the readers attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inner the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is accomplished only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that turn in 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 construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to stave off 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 poetic form