"You're stupid and Ezra Pound is not." Also, Modernism is a plot by the CIA. · 8:26pm Jan 13th, 2015
"You're stupid and Ezra Pound is not" is <a 2-year-old blog post on Modernist poetry> that I think is pretty insightful. (I don't understand the title, since the post seems to say the opposite.)
There are two issues:
1) isolating poetry from what resembles it (prose, fragments, ordinary speech) and
2) creating poetry from what it should resemble (beauty, intelligence, inspiration, song).
Now, what happens when 1) and 2) are reversed? What happens when poetry is created from prose and isolated from beauty?
The Modernist revolution, of course....
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
- "The Raven", 1845, Ed PoeSo much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
- “The Red Wheel Barrow”, 1923, William Carlos WilliamsIs the Williams more interesting as prose? Does it seem more like real speech?
Neither.
When we compare Poe’s iconic 19th century poem—supposedly the fussy verse the Vers Libre Modernists were rebelling against—to an iconic piece of Modernism, “The Red Wheel Barrow,” we find something odd: the Williams poem is not moving towards ease of prose or speech; compared to the Poe, the Williams poem evinces neither interesting verse nor interesting prose.
Williams presents his tiny poem... as if it were a billboard looming over Times Square, or as if he didn’t understand how to use commas and therefore substituted white space.
...
We somehow believe that Shakespeare and Shelley and Milton and Poe wrote poetry burdened by the fact that it wasn’t prose and that the Modernist revolution freed us from this burden by putting prose into poetry.
But prose was always in poetry.
(I don't understand the alleged connection between modernism and new criticism at the end of the post.)
There's also some interesting conspiracy theories in the comments. One, that the CIA supported Modernism because it was directly opposed to communist art (simple iconic realism with extremely simple meanings). This theory comes from the fact that the CIA's director of counter-intelligence during the cold war, James Jesus Angleton, was a Modernist poet:
The young Angleton was a poet and, as a Yale undergraduate, editor, with Reed Whittemore, of the Yale literary magazine Furioso, which published many of the best-known poets of the inter-war period, including William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound. He carried on an extensive correspondence with Pound, Cummings and T. S. Eliot, among others, and was particularly influenced by William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity.[3] He was trained in the New Criticism at Yale by Maynard Mack and others, chiefly Norman Holmes Pearson, a founder of American Studies, and briefly studied law at Harvard.[4]
TS Eliot's lawyer was supposedly also in special intelligence. Meanwhile, another two comments says that Ezra Pound got his modernist ideas from his fascist buddies, and that his Cantos are about anti-Semitism. Yet another comment notes that Yeats, an important precursor to Modernism, was deeply involved with some kind of semi-Satanist secret society, which Aleisteir Crowley was also in.
So you've got Nazis, the CIA, and Satanists all conspiring to cripple English literature. I really wish this theory were true. Tim Powers could get a novel out of it, or maybe Thomas Pynchon.
Loonier conspiracy theories about "influence operations" have been shown to be real... such as the Bin Laden Demon-Doll.
2720438 Linked article says,
Anybody know which intellectual magazines the CIA subsidized?
2720461 Encounter magazine. Not specifically modernist as far as I can tell.
The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review: sorta existentialist, sorta modernist.
robertboynton.com:
I;d love to see what Pynchon could do with it. Tom Robbins could have an interesting spin too.
Maybe the causation is backward. Maybe English literature self-immolated in order to cripple Nazis, Satanists, and the CIA.
Two outta three ain't bad!
I have always been told that 'Modern Art' was supported by the CIA during the cold war. It doesn't seem particularly far-fetched to me. The Nazi and Satanist... well anti-semitism has always had a healthy following and Satanists... Scientology has a pretty big following among the rich and famous now-a-days.
2720460
The closest that leaps to mind is Illuminatus! which is one of...well. It has to be experienced. Multiple times. And even after 10 years it still boggles the mind in new ways each time I read it
2720892
Yeah, Yeats was into occult stuff but it was the late Victorian period and it was all the rage among the upper-class. It wasn't really a secret secret society, so much as an open-secret society.
Also, I don't really consider him a modernist.
On the other hand, the CIA supporting Modern Art is one of those stories that's possible but also the kind of thing people would love to spread around even if it wasn't true, so I'd need more information to weigh in on that. I suspect the CIA supported anti-communist art (whatever they considered that) and if the head of the CIA was a modernist, then he would have prioritized that kind of art.
Oh look, it's my least-favorite poem. :B
Ezra Pound left America to join the Fascists during World War II. He regularly made broadcasts for Mussolini's government while it was killing Americans in the field. We wanted to hang him after the War, but they Ivy League was strong to save.
Richard Armour summed him up quite nicely: "He believed that Roosevelt was a Communist and, since he was not a Republican, he was declared insane."
I've read only one Tim Powers novel, The Stress of Her Regard. His historical characters are rich, vivid and believable. His original characters are cyphers whose only purpose is to be beaten almost to death in one scene, just to come back in the next. Rather like Wyle E. Coyote, but without the brio.
As for the CIA...yes, yes they backed Modernist art. Against this:
thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/images/2008/05/13/301pxroses_for_stalin_by_vladimirsk.jpg
Why, the bastards.
2720460
No kidding. It is the next Da Vinci Code, folks.
Though the modernists would hate it.
2721114
If it passes the Turing Test, it can't be the worst poem. I'm pretty sure some modernist poems don't.
2721105
The other problem is that it isn't especially meaningful, as the CIA supported large numbers of wacky things, including trying to use psychics to spy on the Soviets, trying to figure out if it was possible to create psychic assassins, trying to get Castro's beard to fall out, and slipping LSD into each others' coffee to observe the effects of someone being unwittingly dosed with psychoactive substances. Them funding modernist works would be unsurprising, but also not necessarily especially interesting.
Plus Kryptos, which is the piece of art I most associate with the CIA, is pretty awesome.
2721213
I think it's just because I had to deep-analyze it for English class once and it's just a single fucking sentence with no metrics or wordplay or even making sense and if you want my opinion, they should have used William Carlos Williams instead of Ezra Pound for the title of that post. :|
2721271
Man, I feel like I should be thankful that we never ended up reading garbage like that in any of my English classes.
2721271 I think that Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, & co. explained the theory behind their poetry. So you're supposed to figure out that the poem is about the importance and worthiness ("So much depends on") of the mundane. I think.
Still, there's no good way to get a 2-page essay out of that.
2721213
Or have the Templars assassinate you.
Ah, conspiracy theories. My uncle has a lot of those, but of a more scientific nature; you know, the government using inter-dimensional waves to control our minds and create Katrina and whatnot. The harmless stuff.
I don't think I've ever really read much of anything that's modernist writing; my general analysis would be that people likely got a little too obsessed with it (as usual), but I'm not opposed to reinterpretations of foundational ideals when it comes to art. Go off and explore and break rules if you want, I'm not going to stop you; just don't turn around and snub your nose at those who choose to stay behind. Which is, of course, what everyone ends up doing, because we're humans and have this thing called pride, and love to think we're better than others and condemn them. Weeee.
2720718
I legitimately don't know whether you're tagging the Satanists or the CIA as the non-crippled group.
2720522
There are times when I feel offended to have won the cold war.
2721299
Well, my grandfather was a Mason...
2721508
Oh, come on. Have you seen their crappy cold-war art? It's all the same. It's all, "More energy! More revolutionary fervor! More manly biceps! Not subtle like capitalist pig Normal Rockwell."
(Disclaimer: I love Normal Rockwell non-ironically)
2721521
So this is from the US, and from 1920—not exactly cold war Russia—but when I think "communist art", this is what I think.
And it's beautiful, and I'd take this over a painting of Campbell's soup cans any day of the week.
2721540 It's okay, but there are a million pictures, paintings, posters, drawings, and statues all across Russia of the same scene: Communist worker, grim-faced, giant wrench or hoe or rifle in hand, bare to the shoulders, muscles straining for the Party.
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/04/a8/df/04a8dfbd2f6093a28024636a83b77bf9.jpg
i.imgur.com/ZUunJ.jpg
andrikyrychok.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/soviet_posters.jpg?w=816
andrikyrychok.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/10-lyet-soviet-industrial-movement-propaganda-poster-limited-c10112484.jpeg?w=754
go.distance.ncsu.edu/gd203/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/worker_poster.jpg
robertgraham.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/october-propaganda-poster.jpg
russia-ic.com/img/culture_art/sculpture_rus_05.jpg
4.bp.blogspot.com/_ymIKDEydbq8/TMwfdz2fv_I/AAAAAAAABLI/t67VcR-mudY/s1600/10g+Warsaw+-+MDM+(5)+Marszalkowska.JPG
2720460
There's only one reasonable explanation. The modernists secretly control the world, and they're preventing word from ever getting out.
If nothing else, the push that Modernist poetry got from high-ranking officials would explain a lot of the hate towards it. People are prone to thinking that their ideas are more profound than "outsiders" would find them, so I can't blame literary Modernists for having an inflated sense of importance, nor do I think that that alone is responsible for the strong feelings people seem to have towards them. My only explanation is that it was forced to spread faster than the "movement" could get its bearings. Modernist poetry tends not to stand on its own, and the lack of communication between Modernists and Those Looking ensured that the divide was never closed. The Modernists festered in their growing clique, and the "outsiders" festered in their frustration at its inexplicable influence. Then at some point, today happened.
At this point I really just have to wonder if you're not inflating something to be a bigger deal than it already is. It wouldn't surprise me if you tried to find a witty way of saying that James Joyce's eyepatch/eyeglasses combo looked dumb.
Not that I'm disagreeing with anything you've said so far. I just find your fixation pretty funny, like Joyce's appearance. He bears an uncanny resemblance to John Cleese.
2721296
Nor is it any fun, especially when wheelbarrows, rainwater and chickens are not terribly important, all things considered.
2721792 This time, it happened because I'm trying to write an article about fan-fiction for some yet-unchosen media outlet, hopefully a large newspaper. I thought I needed to make the point that there have been no really new literary movements since modernism. I got bogged down in New Criticism, which seems to have nothing to do with modernism except that it was begun by TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, also the two key figures in starting literary modernism. Maybe they were just busy guys.
BTW, there are 2 key books on New Criticism, "Understanding poetry" and "Understanding fiction". These have been standard textbooks for 80 years. Yet some robot reverse-price-war online has pushed the price for used copies of these very common, 40-to-80-year-old textbooks up to $80. I managed to find the last cheap copy of each on alibris.
2721273
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand...
I, too, dislike the Modernist poets. Reading them, however, with a perfect contempt for them one discovers that they occasionally say gracious things gracefully, in and amongst their 90% that is crap.
Just like the Victorian poets, the Romantic poets, the Enlightenment poets, and, um...well, poets.
2721540
"Rick, man, Vyvyan's been looking for you. He found out you ate all the toad-in-the-hole. He's real pissed--took him weeks to catch all those toads.
"Think you better leave the squat for a few, man..."
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/c/c2/Fluttershy_you_okay_S2E25.png/revision/latest?cb=20120516154033
2721521 "I love Normal Rockwell un-ironically" AND TO THINK I RESPECTED YOU!
2720718 I would very much like to subscribe to your newsletter.
All seriousness though for a moment, your blog posts are often even better than your writing, which I consider to be of already high caliber. Thank you for bringing up interesting points and by raising the average IQ of the room just be entering it Bad Horse. I look forward to posting some serious discussions on your other blog posts when work isn't killing me. However I wanted to encourage you to keep posting on these topics as they are quite interesting.