Ryan Ruby, "Dig It Up Again" | Baudelaire, "Little Poems in Prose"

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Dig It Up Again

A century of The Waste Land.

BY Ryan Ruby, December 12, 2022

 

 

흥미로운 내용의 긴 에세인데, 보기로, 앞과 뒷부분에서만 조금 발췌한다.

 

For Eliot, understanding poetry was overrated. He knew from his reading of Dante that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” The Waste Land communicated to its audience as poetry always has: through the enchanting music and striking images of its lines.

 

Quotability has been the defining characteristic of poetry, in the West at least, since its origins in the oral performances of the Homeric bards in Dark Age Greece. It is the means by which a poem enters the unconscious life of a culture and how it survives there. Eliot pays his respects to this function by inserting dozens of quotations from the Upanishads and the Bible to Dante and Shakespeare to Baudelaire and Wagner in The Waste Land. Since Eliot’s death, however, the poets who carried on the legacy of formal innovation associated with Modernism largely eschewed quotability and conceived of poetry as a form to interface with visually and conceptually .... But that does not mean quotability disappeared; rather, it was subsumed by a different genre: pop music. The Swedish Academy recognized this when, in 2016, it controversially awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

The Waste Land was Pound’s poem—in more ways than one. The manuscript Eliot delivered to Pound in Paris in early January 1922 bore the working title “He Do the Police in Different Voices” and an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

 

Pound and his blue pencil cut the poem in half, making changes major and minor .... Along with dozens of more local substitutions and cuts to individual words and lines, he also sent Eliot in search of a new epigraph ... and perhaps even a new title.

 

Eliot ... later had this to say: Here I must admit that I am…not guiltless of having led critics into temptation…the result is that [the Notes] became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes.

 

[Eliot] was a key tastemaker who directly fostered the careers of an entire generation of English-language poets and writers, including Stephen Spender, Djuna Barnes, William Empson, Philip Larkin, Louis Zukofsky, David Jones, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, and Ted Hughes.

 

The distinctive feature of the apex period called high Modernism, however, is that, for a few years, such works were at the center of Western cultural life, rather than at the margins, to which they have receded today.

 

The 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis of 1922 offers not only the occasion to praise The Waste Land, but also the occasion to bury it, ... the corpse surrendered to the gardens of the past will inevitably sprout and bloom once more in the future. When April comes, we'll dig it up again.

 

 

 

"Dig It Up Again" 삽화. Art by David Cooper.

 

 

 

Baudelaire, "Poems In_Prose" (1869)

 

 

 

아래는 Ryan Ruby의 또 다른 에세이 "Mind the Gaps" (2021)에서.

 

“Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness?” he [Charles Baudelaire, on Christmas Day 1861] wrote to Houssaye.... Baudelaire’s “little poems in prose” inspired a generation of French Modernists to undertake experiments in what they called vers libre or free verse: poetry untethered from meter, the feature that had distinguished it as a literary form, in the West at least, since Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

 

After an initial period of heated controversy, free verse was assimilated into the wider current of poetry and not long thereafter became a dominant mode of lyric production, perhaps because the use of lineation allowed practitioners to point to a visual continuity with recognized verse forms.

 

[P]rose poetry has become increasingly popular over the past 30 to 40 years, especially in North America, where it is recognized as a standard form.

 

Whereas the temporal strategy of most novels is to accelerate the speed of reading with smooth sentences that conform to semantic expectations, thus achieving the kind of exit velocity called “escapism,” the temporal strategy of the poem is to multiply meanings and defy expectations to burrow into the moment, distending it and expanding the impression of its duration. (The extent to which this observation does not hold for a modernist novel ... is precisely the extent to which these novels can be described as poetic.)