No, I understand you, Walter. And very well. Actually, Dante had already done this. In the Vita Nuova , wonderful book! Dante orders his poem to to go to his lady and speaks in prose about his experiences and the poems he is about to write of these experiences, so that his thoughts are, and are not, his poems, in a kind of hyper-simple, hyper-mysterious, writing-workshop.
English took a long time to catch up to Dante. The All-Encompassing Genius vs. Avant-garde Hacks. Emerson and Whitman represent the pseudo-liberal position, always divisive, incomplete, and rather bullying. Why do people take Pound so seriously? Talk fame garners fame, etc. But he began as an Imagiste ripping off haiku. He was extremely pro-war his entire career. People know that, right?
His attempt to write school textbooks in middle age bombed. Pound influenced no one. He was a social butterfly. His chief income was money from dad. His influence was social, not literary, and even in this sphere he was a loser. When his ex-girlfriend H. Pound was the one witness to the wedding. Pound ends up in a cage after a sequence of literary failures; Eliot remarries and helps to rescue fascist Pound.
This may be the worst poem ever written. We eat plums and only smell flowers so plums are more utilitarian than flowers. Eliot tried to think in terms of balance with his objective correlative. Eliot asked: How much emotion does this object deserve? There can only be one Ashbery—a poet lauded because he cannot be understood. You try it today, and see how far you get.
For this very reason. Avant-garde gestures—if they are truly avant-garde— work once, and once only. After the toilet is put into the museum, the toilet-in-the-museum joke is no longer funny and will never be funny, or interesting, again. The idea for the poem is not the poem.
