The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Group

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s-n
s-n

Summarize Pound's attitude toward adjectives?

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Posted by s-n on Tuesday March 17, 2009 at 3:37 PM and tagged with the love song of j. alfred prufrock, themes.

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  1. maldoror Student
    College - Senior

    In his essay "A Few Don'ts" Pound gives a short summation of what he feels poets should shy away from in their poetry.  He writes, "Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something."  So he wasn't against adjectives, just the use of them when the image could be presented in a simpler way.

    Pound was an imagist initially, later he moved toward vorticism.  What Pound was fond of saying was that poets shouldn't overembellish or use ornamental language.  Imagism was a movement that stated that there should be "no ideas but the thing itself."  In his A Retrospect he writes:

    1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective (any meaning comes out of the thing presented itself, it is up to the reader to provide meaning).

    2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation (forget poetic diction, etc).

    3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome (don't force everything into an artificial scheme like iambic pentameter).

    Vorticism was a short-lived movement tied with Cubism and Futurism that espoused stark and simple presentation.

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    Posted by maldoror on Friday May 8, 2009 at 9:18 PM