Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
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16 ene 2011
Seances and Confucianism
Do we have to take Yeats séances and Pound's Confucianism at the same level of seriousness? To me they are both symptoms of modernist weirdness, eccentricity.
I take Pound's confucianism pretty seriously. In fact, Pound changed my thinking about Eastern philosophy; it was a good corrective to an easy Taoist pose I developed as an undergraduate.
I've never really thought seriously about the occult, however, and don't think an immersion in Yeats's poetry (or prose) would change that. But I guess that begs the question you are asking.
I'm not sure how one could take Pound seriously if one found it necessary to dismiss his Confucianism as mere "weirdness". Then again, I've been starting to think similar things about his fascism, which is a someone disturbing experience.
It's not entirely clear how seriously Yeats took his own occultism, is it? It's been a while since I read the Roy Foster biography but Foster seemed to suggest that Yeats was almost agnostic about the whole thing. Of course one has to know something about the system to understand the later poems.
I take Pound's confucianism pretty seriously. In fact, Pound changed my thinking about Eastern philosophy; it was a good corrective to an easy Taoist pose I developed as an undergraduate.
ResponderEliminarI've never really thought seriously about the occult, however, and don't think an immersion in Yeats's poetry (or prose) would change that. But I guess that begs the question you are asking.
I'm not sure how one could take Pound seriously if one found it necessary to dismiss his Confucianism as mere "weirdness". Then again, I've been starting to think similar things about his fascism, which is a someone disturbing experience.
It's not entirely clear how seriously Yeats took his own occultism, is it? It's been a while since I read the Roy Foster biography but Foster seemed to suggest that Yeats was almost agnostic about the whole thing. Of course one has to know something about the system to understand the later poems.
ResponderEliminarHey wait! the Confucianism is just about the only aspect of Pound's intellect (aside from versification and satire) I'm comfortable with.
ResponderEliminar