The organic integration of aesthetic theory into poetry itself-here in the guise of more or less explicit quotations-serves to call into question the metaphorical nature of Eliot’s ideas, blurring the usual distinction between discursive modes: here, the poetry is literal, incarnating theoretical gestures in the poetic voice, while the theory remains metaphorical. Ducroux first looks at Eliot’s allusive appropriation of past texts, seeing it as a literal putting into practice of the idea, famously formulated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” according to which works of the past are altered by any new addition to them. If one takes into account the ironical relationship between his critical writings and his poems, Eliot’s aesthetics thus appears to be much more dynamic and plastic than merely prescriptive. Eliot’s apparently clear-cut distinction between poetry and theory, manifested in what has been petrified into critical commonplaces, Amélie Ducroux starts from the poet’s mock authoritative declarations in his essays and shows how his poetry produces its own forms of theoretical and critical discourse, premised not so much on the conservative attempt to obey the lessons of the “quiet-voiced elders” as on debunking the very precepts it seems to support in the first place. Conversely, many of these writers’ creative pieces explore, and often reveal, theoretical/critical probes into poetic idioms-a feature which is even more obvious in the domain of other art forms such as music or architecture (one immediately thinks of Arnold Schoenberg or Mies van der Rohe), here illustrated by the poetic/theoretical practice of John Cage.ĢTo analyze T.S. Eliot tried to integrate the programmatic, prescriptive dimension of poetic theory within their poetic practice, thereby challenging what Perloff calls “the expository or critical” mode. In their overall strategy to emphasize formal innovation, American writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Hilda Doolittle and T.S. In The Futurist Moment, Marjorie Perloff shows how “he novelty of Italian Futurist manifestos is their brash refusal to remain in the expository or critical corner, their understanding that the group pronouncement, sufficiently aestheticized, can, in the eyes of the mass audience, all but take the place of the promised art work.” 2 Building upon this premise of early, pre-World-War-One Modernism-which crucially contributed to blurring the boundaries between artwork and critical/theoretical commentary-the five articles gathered here under the heading “Aesthetics of Theory” undertake to study how the aesthetic dimensions and determinants of Modernist “theoretical” writings may be characterized. 1 In much the same way, this issue of Transatlantica intends to focus on the tensions, frictions, and contradictions between poetic writing and aesthetic discourse, between practice and theory. 2 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chic (.)ġ“What is the productive tension between ‘poetics’ and ‘poetry’ as these terms are currently used?” asks critic Maria Damon. Can these Bones Live?” In Michel Delville & Christine Pagnoull (.) 1 Maria Damon, “The Poetics of Poetry.
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