tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post114575799171654245..comments2024-02-23T03:28:33.435-05:00Comments on Culture Industry: But what do you compare it to?Mark Scrogginshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1145988243257280462006-04-25T14:04:00.000-04:002006-04-25T14:04:00.000-04:00When I spoke of the "content-free, non-referential...When I spoke of the "content-free, non-referential etc.," I wasn't characterizing Pound, but unravelling some of the implications of the Pater statement that he returns to so often in his critical works.<BR/><BR/>I'm pretty leery of taking Pound's rhetoric of poetry and music as invariable historical truth -- sure, okay, when Sappho wrote she was probably composing something that was a combination of music and words; but as early as Simonides one sees a poetry -- maybe not a *lyric* poetry, but a poetry nonetheless -- clearly designed for inscription rather than singing. By the time of Horace, as WR Johnson argues in *The Idea of Lyric*, one already has a *rhetoric* of musicality which has replaced actual music in the lyric poem.<BR/><BR/>(The poetry/music combination, it strikes me, is like the mythic notion of the divine founding of one's own city. Nobody remembers it, and nobody can tell quite how it happened, but once upon a time... Or maybe it's an edenic parable...)<BR/><BR/>When you say that "lyric poetry was always conceived as poetry to music from Pindar to Dante," you lay your finger on a power rhetorical imagining of what poetry is -- a kind of self-definition of lyric -- but it takes us back to what I was trying to say in the post: that the poem as music is a metaphor, & only one out of a number of metaphors poets can choose from (and it seems always could, since you except the tragic & epic).<BR/><BR/>Many things are telling me these days I ought to discover Townes Van Zandt.Mark Scrogginshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1145959656791579002006-04-25T06:07:00.000-04:002006-04-25T06:07:00.000-04:00Frank Kermode has a wonderful essay on this topic ...Frank Kermode has a wonderful essay on this topic in Pieces of My Mind: "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1145814233494118082006-04-23T13:43:00.000-04:002006-04-23T13:43:00.000-04:00The best thing I've read on poetry & music is an e...The best thing I've read on poetry & music is an essay by Donald Justice (an accomplished musician & occasional composer himself), in his book OBLIVION.<BR/><BR/>He points out the confusedness in most "expressive" theories of poetry, including those related to music.<BR/><BR/>He notes that sound effects (melopeia) in poetry tend ultimately toward nonsense (rather than expression) : and that this is often kind of a "necessary" nonsense, a veering toward anarchy & play. <BR/><BR/>There's MUCH more in this little essay - I just wanted to mention it.Henry Gouldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com