Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Machine Poetics: Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination by Tony Tost Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Fred Moten ___________________________ Timothy Lenoir ___________________________ Joseph Donahue Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 ABSTRACT Machine Poetics: Pound, Stein and the Modernist Imagination by Tony Tost Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Fred Moten ___________________________ Timothy Lenoir ___________________________ Joseph Donahue An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Tony Tost 2011 Abstract This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of “old media” productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century. The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets’ speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema. Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler iv and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains. v Contents Abstract. ....................................................................................................................iv Introduction. ......................................................................................................................1 Chapter one. Pound’s “Machine Art,” part one: the discourse of modernist sound..........9 Chapter two. Pound’s “Machine Art,” part two: epochal listening, wireless poetics and the sensibility of simultaneity............................................................................................56 Chapter three. Pound’s “Machine Art,” part three: the mastery channel.........................103 Chapter four. Gertrude Stein and the modernist perceptive apparatus..........................146 Conclusion. Apparitions of the crowd: digital poetics.................................................178 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................193 Biography ..................................................................................................................198 vi Introduction This is a handbook to the poetic imagination, as imagined by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. By necessity, I limit my concerns to how Pound’s and Stein’s imaginations mingled with what their peer Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of reality.”1 For Stevens, the pressure of reality was “the pressure of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation.” I have limited this idea even further, down to just one reality, the pressure of new technologies and media on the poetic imagination. But it was not only the din of new technologies and media with which poets had to cope. Telegraphs, cinema, typewriters, radios, industrial factories and motorized transportation: these emerging and proliferating phenomena also altered the poetic mind’s conception of itself, offering material models for its own dimensions and faculties. For Pound and Stein at least, the pressure of a new technological reality did not exclude contemplation, but rather midwifed new powers of contemplation. Stevens argued that poetry helped people live their lives, for poetry was a violence from within which matched a violence from without. He implicitly addressed the technological bent of this violence from without when he wrote, “It is not only that there are more of us and that we are actually close together. We are close together in every way. We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no 1 The Necessary Angel, p. 20. 1 distance.”2 Lying in bed and listening to Egypt, an activity of contemporary resonance certainly, would have been, in the lifetimes of the poets of this study, literally a world- changing achievement. One would have to alter one’s inner geography in order to correspond to such a radically re-imagined outer one. Both geography are among poetry’s provinces, and are the objects of this study. What this dissertation is not, however, is a study of the history of new technologies and media in the early 20th century. Neither is it a study of how these new technologies and media inflected social relations among varying populations, classes and ethnicities. Rather, I take an extended look at how new technologies and media were incorporated into the modernist poetic imagination, as exemplified by Pound and Stein. In researching and writing these chapters, I have used simple working definitions for my major terms. For technologies, I mean the mass utilization of machines and tools as well as the development of new techniques that always accompanies such mass utilizations. For media, I mean those materials developed to store and convey information. For poetic imagination, I mean the faculties, domains and processes that the poetic mind realizes for itself in the act of creation. I look to Ezra Pound as my primary test case. A poet equally obsessed with carrying forward traditions and with keeping his ideas and forms on the contemporary cutting edge, Pound was a compelling representative of his aesthetic age. While examining Pound’s complex notions about the relationship between technology and the imagination, I return continually to an obscure essay he wrote in the late 1920s, called “Machine Art,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime. By repeatedly passing 2 p. 18. 2 through the technical, poetic, musical, historical and even mythic concerns of this prescient and strange essay, my argument’s focus expands and contracts in concentric circles, pulling in important contemporaries to Pound, including George Antheil, Luigi Russolo, Fernando Pessoa, FT Marinetti, Igor Stravinsky and Andre Breton. And in keeping with Pound’s own sense of the felt simultaneity of historical epochs, my research also telescopes forward and backward to discuss the oral Greek poets and musical Troubadours that served as important models to Pound, as it also touches upon important post-Poundian poets, thinkers and artists such as Charles Olson, Stan Brakhage, Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan and Jerome Rothenberg. By employing a Poundian critical method for looking at how Pound situated himself (and how he has been continually re-situated by those working in his wake) within the creative ferment of an ever-reinvented literary tradition, my dissertation indirectly argues for an alternative method for historicizing his work. I aim to present a newly accurate way of looking at Pound’s sensibility by integrating new media and modernist literary criticism together, to use Pound’s concurrent interest not only in poetry, translation and criticism, but also in technology, history, myth, music and visual culture as an entry point for apprehending the complex knot of problems his difficult writing addressed. In the first chapter, I demonstrate how Ezra Pound’s musical and technological writings are fundamental for understanding the truly radical nature of his poetic sensibility. I situate Pound in his technological and aural context, showing how he took aesthetic and intellectual inspiration from machine forms and rhythms. Pound perceived 3 that these machines reconfigured how time itself might be heard and even felt. He then adapted this insight when attacking the formal and rhythmic laxities of his own era. Concurrent with this concern with temporality, Pound wished to create more generative contexts in which poets and artists could endeavor their work. The ideal precedents he looked back to were numerous—the situation of the poet-musician in ancient Greece, for instance—but he concentrated most of his attention on the medieval period. For Pound,