Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1

(^424) Anita Patterson



  1. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the
    Annotations of Ezra Pound,ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 125 nn.
    2–3.

  2. Eliot, “From Poe to Valéry,” in To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings(London:
    Faber and Faber, 1965), 32.

  3. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets(New York: Farrar, Straus and
    Cudahy, 1957), 21; hereafter cited as PP.

  4. Quoted in Bruce McElderry, “Eliot’s Shakespeherian Rag,” American Quarterly 9
    (1957): 185.

  5. For a discussion of Eliot’s pursuit of analogies between musical and poetic
    procedures, which situates his engagement with symbolism within the context of
    Stravinsky’s Shakespeare Songsand works by other twentieth-century composers, see James
    Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music
    (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 295–9.

  6. Eliot, “Fragment of an Agon,” in Collected Poems, 1909–1962,119–20.

  7. Referring to the nature of his “experiment” in writing Sweeney Agonistes,Eliot
    recalled: “I once designed, and drafted a couple of scenes, of a verse play. My intention was
    to have one character whose sensibility and intelligence should be on the plane of the most
    sensitive and intelligent members of the audience; his speeches should be addressed to
    them as much as the other personages in the play—or rather, should be addressed to the
    latter, who were to be material, literal-minded and visionless, with the consciousness of
    being overheard by the former. There was to be an understanding between this
    protagonist and a small number of the audience, while the rest of the audience would share
    the responses of the other characters in the play. Perhaps this is all too deliberate, but one
    must experiment as one can” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the
    Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England[London: Faber and Faber, 1933], 153–4; hereafter
    cited as UP).

  8. Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes, “We are forced to wonder aloud where in dialect
    poetry, with the notable exception of Sterling Brown, a black poet used his medium as
    effectively as did Eliot in Sweeney Agonistes” (Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial”
    Self[New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 289 n. 17).

  9. See, e.g., Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture(London: Faber and Faber,
    1948), 121; and Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” in PP,13.

  10. In Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
    (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), Paul de Man argues that the link
    between metonymy and its referent is contingent and accidental; thus reliance on
    metonymic fragments of social reality is problematic. Although Hughes is aware that the
    reader may not understand the historical context of the trope, his poems repeatedly affirm
    that the meaning of African American experience, in certain instances, may be shared by
    readers from different social worlds and cultural backgrounds. His insistence on
    metonymy as a mainstay of his realist poetics is an assertion of his right to creative freedom
    of expression, even at the risk of incomprehensibility.

  11. Spring and All,in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams,ed. A. Walton Litz
    and Christopher MacGowan, vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 203.

  12. Theodor Adorno, “Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening,” in The
    Essential Frankfurt School Reader,ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York:
    Continuum, 1982), 288.

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