Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision

Science in Modernist American Poetry

Barry Ahearn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030365448
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Pound, Frost, Moore and Poetic Precision: Science in American Modernist Poetry ?examines three major poets in light of the demand that poetry aspire to scientific precision. The critical insistence that poetry be precise affected every one of these poets, and looking at how they responded to this insistence offers a new perspective on their achievements and, by extension, twentieth-century poetry in general. Ezra Pound sought to associate poetry with the precision of modern science, technology and mathematics as a way to eliminate or reduce error. Robert Frost, however, welcomed imprecision as a fundamental aspect of existence that the poet could use. Marianne Moore appreciated the value of both precision and imprecision, especially with respect to her religious perspective on human and natural phenomena. By analyzing these particular poets' reaction to the value placed on precision, Barry Ahearn explores how that emphasis influenced the broader culture, literary culture and twentieth-century Modernist American poetry.

© The Author(s) 2020

B. AhearnPound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Barry Ahearn¹

(1)

Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

Barry Ahearn

End Abstract

This book is about three poets—Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore—and how they responded to the demand that poetry aspire to scientific precision. This may seem a topic of minor importance compared to their involvement with such grave matters as politics, economics, literary history, and contemporary culture. But how they handled this demand affected such concerns; they would not have been the same poets without their varying responses to the insistence that poetry be precise. It is important to add that they often found precision shadowed by its opposite—imprecision. And just as Pound, Frost, and Moore handled precision differently, they found varied uses for imprecision.

Before the early twentieth century, precision had rarely been associated with poetry. Pound sought to marry them as early as 1910 when he proclaimed in The Spirit of Romance (1910) that “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions” (1968, 14). This analogy between poetry and exact mathematics was novel; it had been customary to regard them as barely acquainted. Indeed, poets and novelists sometimes ridiculed science and mathematics. Two centuries earlier, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift had derided the experimental eccentricities of the Royal Society in his description of the grand academy of Lagado. He also satirized the misuse of mathematics in the court of Laputa, where a tailor employs a quadrant, a rule, and compasses to measure Gulliver for a suit of clothes that turns out to be “very ill made.” Between Swift’s day and Pound’s, however, science and mathematics increasingly demonstrated their practical utility. Steamboats freed mariners from dependence on the wind and tide. Samuel F. B. Morse made it possible to communicate instantaneously across vast distances. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had become commonplace to praise science extravagantly. In The Gay Science (1866), Eneas Sweetland Dallas exulted that “In electricity we seem to be hovering on the verge of some grand discovery, and already the electric spark has been trained to feats more marvellous than any recorded of Ariel or Puck. Optics now enable us to discover the composition of the sun, and to detect the presence of metals to the millionth part of a grain. Seven-league boots are clumsy beside a railway; steam-ships make a jest of the flying carpet” (1866, 1: 52). It was not enough for Dallas to boast about the triumphs of science and technology. His disparagement of Ariel, Puck, and the flying carpet implied that the romance of science had eclipsed the fantasies of dramatists, novelists, and poets.

Science and mathematics had increasingly become the means by which civilization measured itself and the surrounding universe. This development raised a number of questions. Did the rise of science necessarily mean the devaluing of aesthetics? Where did this leave poets and novelists? Would they have to accept the fact that they were now merely entertainers? Certainly some poets felt threatened. Hart Crane fumed that “Science (ergo all exact knowledge and its instruments of operation) is in perfect antithesis to poetry” (1997, 232). Crane was only the latest in a distinguished line of literati who resented the glorification of science and the technological miracles accompanying its seemingly irresistible march. Wordsworth had objected to the intrusion of the railroad into his beloved Lake District, horrified that its “noisy machinery, its smoke, and swarms of pleasure-hunters” would profane this “temple of Nature, temples built by the Almighty” (1970, 162–163). The malign effects of science and technology were not limited to their depredations in the landscape. Also alarming was the reverence with which the public regarded such progress, and the consequent inattention to issues at the heart of human life. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has one of his characters in The Land of Mist (1926) complain, “We were not put into this planet in order that we should go fifty miles an hour in a motor-car, or cross the Atlantic in an airship, and send messages either with or without wires. These are the mere trimmings and fringes of life. But these men of science have so riveted our attention on these fringes that we forget the central object” (1952, 341). Had science become a pair of blinders limiting everyone’s vision? Alfred North Whitehead certainly thought that it powerfully affected humanity: “this quiet growth of science has practically recoloured our mentality” (1925, 3). Whitehead, however, considered this development beneficial.

What stance should literature take toward science? Could these competing approaches to reality be reconciled? Should poets and novelists adapt some of the methods of science and mathematics to their art? To be specific, could precision—a value that had increasingly become one of the defining strengths of the sciences—be transferred to literature? A few years after The Spirit of Romance, when launching Imagisme, Pound insisted that poetry could not be truly modern unless it manifested precision. By invoking precision, he was draping poetry with an honor that the public had long since accorded to science. Pound also naturally associated scientific and poetic precision with mathematical rigor, since it seemed that numbers were central to both. Yet by appealing to the prestige of science and mathematics, Pound fixed poetry on a foundation rather more wobbly than he realized.

When James Clerk Maxwell believed mathematics was “the keystone of professional science” (Brown 2013, 115) he was upholding a tenet that had a long and influential history. The progress of science has been clearly indebted to mathematics. But science has not always been considered as rigorous and exact as mathematical formulae and functions. In truth, the assumption that science advances by always cleaving to mathematical precision is a common misunderstanding. As Stephen Weinberg admits, the influence of mathematics on science starting in the sixteenth century persuaded many that science was “the search for mathematically expressed impersonal laws that allow precise predictions of a wide range of phenomena” (2015, 146). Yet, at the same time, there were important instances where mathematical imprecision proved necessary for science to advance. Citing Galileo’s experiments with falling bodies, Weinberg notes, “Galileo demonstrates his understanding of the need for scientists to live with approximations, running counter to the Greek emphasis on precise statements based on rigorous mathematics” (190). In the case of Galileo, and in other cases, scientists who demanded scrupulous mathematical proof exactly fitting a hypothesis became dissatisfied. Indeed, Weinberg goes on to indicate that physical reality may forever elude precise mathematics. “Like me, most physicists today are resigned to the fact that we will always have to wonder why our deepest theories are not something different” (247). No matter how finely we tune our mathematics, at some point physical reality deviates from it. Our notion of precision seems always one step behind the behavior of matter. To put it another way, scientific precision continually discovers that it has been embarrassingly imprecise. As we shall see, Pound’s investment in poetic precision keeps running up against a similarly nagging fuzziness. Precision often failed to live up to the hopes he had for it.

A number of studies have addressed the question of how science, mathematics, and technology influenced Modernist poetry. One of the best of these, Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987) has nothing to say about Frost or Moore. They seem unrelated to what she calls “gear and girder technology.” She does, however, demonstrate how the mantra of “efficiency” appealed to quite a few American artists and writers, including Pound. In her discussion of Pound, she teases out his emphasis on efficiency in prose and poetry but does not mention his repeated stress on precision. Another study, Lisa M. Steinman’s Made in America: Science, Technology and American Modernist Poets (1987) covers much of the same territory as Tichi’s book, although she devotes a whole chapter to Moore. Steinman follows Tichi, however, in ignoring Frost and has little to say about Pound. Steinman mentions “precision” a few times, but in reference to a mode of painting, American Precisionism, which had its heyday in the Twenties and Thirties.

This study seeks to remedy the neglect of “precision.” It is an odd neglect, since “precision” has enjoyed a much longer life than “efficiency” in discussions about poetry. Critics have treated precision as a simple concept that everyone understands, whereas “efficiency” has a more complex and broad application. Yet “precision” has a history that warrants investigation, as we shall see in the next chapter. It is also important to note that although “efficiency” and “precision” have proven useful as part of the vocabulary of science and engineering, their meanings are not identical. We should not confuse the two. “Efficient” and “efficiency” come from the Latin ex + facere, and therefore imply making or causation. The words “efficient” and “efficiency” carry with them the connotation of an operation or work that has been, is, or will be carried out. They pertain to action. “Precise” and “precision,” however, come from the Latin praecīsiō, which the NOED defines as an “act of cutting off, act of breaking off (in speech).” “Precise” and “precision” are etymologically related to such words as scissors, incision, and caesura. They connote trimming, reduction, and marking a break or boundary. To put it another way, “precise” and “precision” indicate reduction of the superfluous or unnecessary. Furthermore, insofar as they set limits, they suggest a curb on action. Thus “efficiency” and “precision” carry with them traces of opposing intentions.¹

Chapter 2, “To Be Precise,” traces the rising prestige of science and technology since the seventeenth century. The public became accustomed to thinking of science, mathematics, and engineering as essential to material progress. Even as factories and mills belched pollution, the public at large still expected that science would ultimately usher in a clean, bright, and orderly world. Science could ameliorate any of the unfortunate consequences of its triumphs. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, essayists, novelists, and poets took note of this public faith. They were keenly aware of the pressure to infuse in their works some of the same virtues that were claimed for science and technology. In particular, the chapter discusses how the alleged virtue of mathematical and scientific precision presents itself in the work of Poe, Tennyson, Virginia Woolf, and, ultimately, in Pound’s early poetry and criticism.

Chapter 3, “Ezra Pound and Error,” takes as its point of departure Pound’s desire for precision that will enable him to finely discriminate good from evil, truth from error. Pound insists, however, that only someone with visionary intelligence can make such judgments. This insistence creates a problem. Scientific precision ultimately depends upon a communal consensus. Arguments about what does or does not constitute precision are socially adjudicated. Pound preferred to make individual genius the arbiter of precision. As Philip Kuberski put it, “And despite his opposition to sentimental conceptions of the poet popularized by the romantics, Pound attempted to preserve the poet’s authority” (1992, 4).² The more Pound emphasizes the visionary power of the individual genius, the more precision is called into question. And the more precision is called into question the greater the potential for error. Pound was haunted by what he glimpsed on the other side of lines of demarcation—of precision—whether it be the missing words that have been cut off in the poem by Sappho that he translates in “Papyrus ,” the history that has been lost to living memory, or what lies just over the border of commonplace experience in the realm of the supernatural. Anyone committed to the pursuit of such elusive phenomena will inevitably fall into error, although it takes courage—some would (and did) say foolhardiness—to make the effort. We also find in Pound a paradoxical blend of intentions. On the one hand, his desire for precision emphasizes a reduction to essentials (as in his admonition to “cut the cackle” [Con 77], his concentration on gists and piths, and his advice to W. S. Merwin to “Read seeds not twigs” [2002, 10]).³ On the other hand, he promoted efficiency, with its emphasis on production (as when he emphasizes converting ideas into action, or when we consider the sheer volume of words he produced in his lifetime). Someone committed simultaneously to these contrasting virtues could not avoid falling into occasional error. At times such error was trivial; on other occasions it proved nearly fatal.

Chapter 4, “Robert Frost and ‘Something,’” begins by noting that a quite imprecise concept, exemplified by the word “something,” occurs frequently in his poetry. Where Pound would strenuously object to such imprecision, however, Frost deems it a necessary part of the human condition. Frost treats it as a base upon which we can raise simple or elaborate structures. “Something” comes to represent a variety of phenomena that resist initial clarification. It can point to preconscious or unconscious mental currents which, in the course of a poem, become subject to fully conscious discovery and manipulation. On the level of vocabulary, it can take the shape of a cliché or well-worn phrasing that eventually is replaced or modified by unconventional language. Frost’s early seizing upon the “sound of sense,” in which words are unclear while sound stands out, is another example of how the inchoate or inarticulate becomes a springboard for the speaker’s transition to a more precise statement. We should note, however, that although Frost relished the triumph of imposing form on what was chaotic or insufficiently articulated, he was wary of humanity’s propensity to carry precision too far. Thus, in “Education by Poetry ,” he questions the dependence of science on number, and argues that science and the technologies produced by science will always be necessarily limited by that dependence. Frost goes even farther, doubting the ability of other disciplines to grasp their subjects with precision. For example, he suggests that historical research becomes more and more hazy as it delves deeper into humanity’s past.

Chapter 5, “Marianne Moore and ‘Ac-/cident’” examines her attitude toward precision by first observing that she and her critics often use the term. Sometimes Moore means by “precision” a careful deployment of words that promote accuracy. So far so good. This use of precision we recognize. But since “precision” is commonly linked to such qualities as accuracy, efficiency, economy, and utility, it is rather surprising to find that “precision” in Moore’s art often leads to contradiction, ambiguity, obfuscation, and abrupt arrival at an impasse. Precision, in short, in Moore’s hands, can become an instrument for concealment rather than clarity. C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. To Be Precise
• 3. Ezra Pound and Error
• 4. Robert Frost and “Something”
• 5. Marianne Moore and Ac-/cident
• 6. Afterword
• Back Matter