Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
12/23/2022 11:26:58 AM
Subject:
RE: Having missed St. Lucy's Day
I didn't express that very well. Even something self-referential like
Ars Poetica
has to use something outside the poem itself, but the achievement of guys like Williams and MacLeish was that they called more attention to the anatomy of a poem than to its thematic or abstract takeaway. Auden is modernist insofar as he wants you to see his scaffolding and imagery, but the abstract is equally important. MacLeish and Williams tilt the scale in favor of the poem's mechanics. T.S. Eliot was trying to show how Cowley, Donne, et al. were pretty Auden-like 300 years before Auden, and should therefore be re-assessed from a Modernist viewpoint. I doubt that Eliot would have denied that he was implicitly promoting his own poetic agenda.
