Justin wrote:
> [clip] So, we're fucked, right, Carrol?
Not completely so anyhow when I can have that much fun writing a post
off the top of my head. :-)
A whole series of 19th c. poems (beginning with Keats's Nightingale Ode)
may be crudely paraphrased thusly:
The world is all fucked up.
But look, that I (the poet) can dramatize what a fucked up world looks
like means that I have created in my imagination what an unfucked up
world would look like.
And a world that contains that triumph of the imagination is not wholly
fucked up. ******
Yeats didn't think that was good enough: "Once out of Nature I shall
never take / My bodily form from any natural thing [i.e., not from
Keats's bird] / But such a form as grecian goldsmiths make [i.e., dead,
frozen, out of time]. . . .to sing / Of what is past, or passing, or to
come." But Pound came close to returning to Keats at the end of his
life:
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not in the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
. . . . . . . . . .
to "see again,"*
the verb is "see," not "walk on"
i.e. it coheres all right
even if my notes do not cohere.
(Canto CXVI)
(*The roads of France, wish expressed in an earlier Canto.)
But Pound's "Make It New" was Platonic: the same forms endlessly recur,
and must on each occurrence be "made new." History is not Platonic; it
has surprises for us. Perhaps that is what at one time some marxists I
believe called "attentisme."
Carrol
