Rainey 49)24 Subject MatterGiven th

Rainey 49)
24 Subject Matter
Given that the first poem in the sequence had quoted in Greek from
Homer, it is clear that there is no irony attached to the preference for
Attic grace. Although accelerated grimace is clearly an expression of
distaste for the modern age, Pound does not immediately make clear why
poetry should not reflect contemporary society. Is it only because that society
presents an unattractive spectacle an accelerated grimace or would
it be so even if the spectacle of modernity were aesthetically pleasing?
The problem with the modern age is illuminated to a small extent by the
second stanza, which makes clear its impatience with the inward gaze
and other introspective tendencies. The third stanza expands and develops
the first:
The age demanded chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the sculpture of rhyme.
This clarifies the first stanza: the problem with the modern age in relation to
poetry is not simply that the age is unattractive to look at, a grimace, but
that it does not allow time for the composition of what Pound considers to
be real poetry. The acceleration, or the pace of modern life, is the problem,
not the grimace. Not only is plaster a less durable form of sculpture, but,
once the mould is created, sculptures can be mechanically reproduced.
I have treated it as obvious that the poems examined above are reflexive.
However, in order to deal with more subtle cases, it is necessary to state
more formally what makes them so. A reader-response critic might argue
that they are reflexive only because we choose to interpret them that
way. What makes them reflexive? Above all else, in the Yeats and Pound
poems, it is the presence of the words poem and poetry. To a Steam
Roller is a little more veiled, but the use of wit and of the quotation
that speaks of impersonal judgment in aesthetic / matters clearly gesture
towards poetry: although the quotation refers to aesthetics in general,
wit is a quality more closely associated with literature than with other
arts. To generalize: the crucial detail about reflexive poems is that they
include the vocabulary of aesthetics. That vocabulary does not need to be
a particularly technical vocabulary associated with philosophical aesthetics:
for the present purposes, even the word poem counts as relevant.
Languages change through time, and the present-day language in which
we discuss poetry is not identical to that used by modernist writers.
Reflexivity 25