The Dance of the Intellect

by Perloff, Marjorie

• ISBN13: 9780810113800
• ISBN10: 0810113805
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-08-12
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single", or can it accommodate the "impurities" Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions to which Marjorie Perloff addresses herself in the essays collected here. The first group of essays deals with Pound's own poetics as that poetics related to two of his great contemporaries, Stevens and Joyce, as well as to the visual arts of his day. The second group deals with the more technical aspects of verse and prose. In the last four essays, Perloff takes up broader issues, including the current pessimism about the state of poetry, and the work of experimental poets and conceptual poets.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
Pound/Stevens: whose era?	1	(32)
The portrait of the artist as collage-text: Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska and the ``italic'' texts of John Cage	33	(41)
``Letter, penstroke, paperspace'': Pound and Joyce as co-respondents	74	(14)
``To give a design'': Williams and the visualization of poetry	88	(31)
``The shape of the lines'': Oppen and the metric of difference	119	(16)
Between verse and prose: Beckett and the New Poetry	135	(20)
From image to action: the return of story in postmodern poetry	155	(17)
Postmodernism and the impasse of lyric	172	(29)
``Unimpededness and interpenetration'': the poetic of John Cage	201	(14)
The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the eighties	215	(24)
Index	239