Why People Need Poetry

[ananda]

3. And as much as I might detest Ezra Pound ...

... he did emphasize that the power of the language is in the image, that it's important to avoid abstraction as much as possible. I agree with that, even though most of his poetics has ruined American poetry working from the sensibility of the Pound ethos, with the notable exception of T S Eliot, who in a sense might be considered British. Maybe Pound was trying to outdo the French symbolists in his overly dramatic wish to be different. Guy Davenport parses this problem out very well in explaining that the French don't take themselves too seriously, having more of a sense of play that doesn't overstay its welcome, so to speak. Americans, he says, take this stuff way too seriously. That was certainly true of Pound.