Saturday, October 31, 2009

EZRA Pound The Spirit of Romance Unprecented Definition of Poetry

I have never seen such a definition and it strikes me as being truthful and instantaneously clicked with me and appeared in Pound's book. Pound is the most underrated of scholars and also one of the very intuitive scholars with an intuitive sense of the mystical and a detailed knowledge of the literature of the Middle Ages . He eschews conventional and pigeon holed labels such as "classical" and "romantic" as meaningless and gauges poetry by other than conventional measurements..
He describes poetry as inspired mathematics with the emphasis on inspired. They are equations for human emotions. To those inclined to magic or incantations, rather than science,this definition sounds more arcane and recondite, and does not fit neatly into "classical" or "romantic" in pigeon hole fashion/format.
The character of the spells experienced by the great poets , more often in past ages than this present. more inebriated with the arcane, with visions of other worlds in the guise of their poetic works, and geared to their peculiar characters. These poetic works were couched artificially as either "classical" or "romantic" by later critics apparently and accurately so. Classic applied to beauty of the normal, and romantic applied to beauty of the unusual. The unusual are momentary glimpses ,apparently, of other worlds and slivers thereof, imported into the poet's vision, and transcribed by him or her and imported with meaning . Many more glimpses appeared in ages past than in this present.

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