Pound, Eliot, and Other Major Players

I find that most of the readings for this week sound more like instruction manuals than anything else, a list of suggestions and rules for writers and aspiring writers. This is, of course, truer for some of the selections, Pound for instance whose “A retrospect” actually includes, “A LIST OF DON’TS for those beginning to write verses” (59). Although Pound’s writing most directly illustrates what is good, “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’” and composition in musical phrase, (58) for instance, others such as Hulme and Eliot describe similar directives in their work regarding modernist writing. Though all describe the specifics slightly differently and all hone in on variations of certain rules, Eliot, Hulme, Pound, Rainey, and Kermode tend to mention several of the same factors and urge writers of poetry and prose to comply with several of the same rules of what the major players of modernism consider most crucial to literary success.
Speaking of literary success, several of the readings focus on economic issues that faced writers in the early twentieth century. I believe it was Rainey who went into the most depth as he described Eliot’s difficulties in deciding where to publish The Waste Land. After careful consideration of the three contenders, the Little Review, the Dial, and Vanity Fair, he chose the Dial because they “offered to give Eliot the annual Dial Award of $2,000 as a price for the poem,” (51) and, possibly because Eliot negotiated as successfully as he wrote, “the Dial also agreed to purchase 350 copies of the first printing [of The Waste Land]” (51). I bring any of this up because I think it is important to understand that despite the academic voice that permeates “Tradition and the Individual Talent” or Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism,” these men were concerned with the payoff of their work, which is something that I, at least, had not commonly associated with them or with modernism as a whole.
I instead tend to think of the advice that Eliot provides in his essays. For instance he urges, “The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all” (43). Or, in a later passage, Eliot similarly emphasizes the importance of taking something that is not necessarily brand new, but rather to mold what has been done before in a different way. He says, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different” (153). The overall point here is that what has been done before can be done again and should be reused if done properly. He eloquently reminds readers that this is an unavoidable reality saying, “‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did’. Precisely, and they are that which we know” (40). Modernism may have been all about making things “new,” but there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
However, let me return to my original observation that Pound and Eliot read like technical guides; “A retrospect” and all of Eliot’s essays sound as though they could be printed in modernism for not-so-dumb dummies. For example, we learn “A few don’ts” from Pound, one of which explains “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (59). I find this much like the “objective correlative” that Eliot describes in “Hamlet.” He refers to this as “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative” (48). He continues to explain, the ‘objective correlative’ as a formula wherein the image and emotion work together, one evoking the other—I think.
I found most of the other instructions to be far less complicated. Eliot’s suggestions regarding language and structure are much more straight-forward. This is fitting since he asserts, “the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure" (62). Pound too echoes this sentiment, “Use no superfluous word” (60). Overall, it was the agreement between Pound and Eliot in what they felt the best advice to give other writers and readers of modern literature most striking. I was also surprised, despite reading several of the works before, at how straight-forward their advice was. Complex matters remain complex, but the language in which they are articulated is simple.