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Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Charles Altieri
Charles Altieri*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Extract

One major theme in modernism is the desire to wring the neck of rhetoric. The best modern poetry feels compelled both to accept the metonymic mode of discourse and to transcend it to allow for the full play of human consciousness without making consciousness equal interpretation of experience. Both the symbolist mode of Yeats and Eliot and the objectivism of Williams and contemporary poets can be seen as methods for responding to this problem. Symbolism seeks to complement the objective image by reconstituting versions of Idealism’s Absolute Self. The poet achieves a vision of the fullness of human consciousness by meditating on the implications of his own creative act, a process first adumbrated by Flaubert. Williams, on the other hand, particularly in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” brings the full play of consciousness into objective experience by seeking to render the act of mind as a process sharing the palpable physical qualities of things.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 101 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976

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References

Notes

1 I have given an elaborate explanation of these 2 traditions in “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics,” boundary 2, 1 (1973), 605^1. A full bibliography of relevant discussions is given in that essay.

2 Two relevant essays by Lukâcs are cited in n. 10. Winters' arguments are often repeated, but they are expressed most fully in Primitivism and Decadence (New York: Arrow, 1937). See also Graham Hough, Image and Experience (London: Duckworth, 1960). Similar treatments of various aspects of my general argument can be found in Donald Wesling, Wordsworth and the Adequacy of Landscape (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) and Wylie Sypher, Literature and Technology : The Alien Vision (New York: Random, 1968).

3 I have used the following texts and abbreviations in this paper: Madame Bovary, ed. Paul de Man (New York: Norton, 1965), MB; T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909- 1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1963), CP; Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1960), LE; William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (London: Mac Gibbon & Kee, 1970), I; and Williams, Selected Essays (New York: Random, 1954), SE.

4 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago : Phoenix, 1966), pp. 224–44.1 quote from p. 231. Fora more careful treatment of the many uses of metonymy, see Michel Le Guern, Sémantique de la métaphore et de la métonymie (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1973). A famous story indicates the problem of taking all metonymy as signs of absence. Once Poulet came to breakfast and said he had been reading Melville. When asked what Melville, he replied, “Tout.” “Melville” is surely no metonymy in Lévi-Strauss' sense. On the other hand, his definition of metonymy works very nicely to show what is going on in the synecdochic phrases we use to stand for women or to represent people of different races. The term “blacks” might be seen as the reduction of a full human being to what are largely superficial aspects. Something important is absent, whether the term be used by white racists or proponents of black power. Moreover, in using the term we immediately evoke a systematic relationship with “whites,” but only to insist upon their differences and to leave absent or lacking the deeper similarities we hope exist between the races. These similarities do exist within the traditional metaphoric discourse of Christianity where we are all called brothers. For a much more complex, and to my mind even more problematic, exploration of the psychological implications of metaphor and metonymy, see Anthony Wilden's commentary on Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 238–49.

5 In an essay “Steps of the Mind in T. S. Eliot's Poetry,” forthcoming in the Bucknell Review, I give a more particularized and extended treatment of some of the topics discussed here. There are more elaborate discussions of “Empedocles on Etna” and of Eliot's particular ways of adapting idealist philosophy to overcome the limits of metonymy. One paragraph here on metaphor and metonymy and the specific reading of “Prufrock” are taken directly from that paper.

6 Louis Martz, The Poem of the Mind (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 5–7, makes a useful description of the meditative process as the “interaction between a projected, dramatized part of the self, and the whole act of the meditative mind.” We need to add that the impulse to meditation and satisfying images of the whole mind changes considerably in Western culture. On the mind coming to possession of itself, see also Robert Langbaum, The Modem Spirit (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1970), pp. 164–99 and essays by Langbaum and A. Walton Litz, in Litz, ed., Eliot in His Time (Princeton : Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 95–128, 3–22. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 505–07, has an interesting discussion of metonymy in poetry and in science. He stresses the scientific tendency to take metonymies—e.g., the body for the spirit—as literal facts. Métonymie poetry tends to foster the scientific spirit it sees as its spiritual antagonist.

7 Williams is perhaps closer to the American grain when he suggests that violence is one possible result of the active mind not finding its energies in the objective science (/. p. 100). On the general problem of satisfying the needs of the mind in an essentially objectivist poetic, see Donald Wesling's Wordsworth and the Adequacy of Landscape (New York : Barnes & Noble, 1970); and on the creative possibilities raised by the modernist awareness of fragments, see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971).

8 Pound's essay on vorticism is available in Richard Ell-mann and Charles Feidelson, eds., The Modern Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965). Here I quote from p. 150, and just below this Pound relates his strategies for transcending the limits of realism and idealism. It would be useful to me if I could argue that Pound sees his own work as a synthesis of those philosophical traditions, but Pound would never make such abstract claims.

9 It is this sense of form as imposing an eternal present on experience that, I think, leads Pound to use mathematical analogues to describe the vorticist image.

10 See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 24–37 et passim, and 2 essays by Georg Lukâcs, “Idea and Form in Literature” (originally “Narrate or Describe”) and “The Ideology of Modernism” in Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. Epifano San Juan, Jr. (New York: Dell, 1973), pp. 109–31, 277–307.