So I will just read to you from the diaries of Ezra Paul, how he described this very

process of writing in stations of metro. Here I have a list of what I practically already
said, what were some principle ???? of images . In short you have to be precise and
concise and to directly treat your subject, and subject is usually a single image or a
single theme. So, direct treatment of a thing, whatever that thing is, precision of
language used , absolutely no words that will not contribute to the presentation, to
what you meant to represent. So no superfluous words, no overwording, something
similar to what Hemingway was doing in the novel, which is minimalistic style. So
every word should have logical reason why it is there. So, they tried to operate, to
play with the colors, and also to try to imitate musical melody, they tried to achieve
this through the choice of wording, and to make language melodious. And Ezra
defined the image as follows: Image is that that presents an intellectual and
emotional complex. Intellectual and emotional complex. Both intellect and emotion,
both head and the heart. But in an instant of time. So because the poem itself being
so short, and he goes on, it is a presentation of such a complex, instantaneously.
Smjesta. Which gives the sense of sudden liberation, that sense of freedom from
time limits, and space limits. Apparition of these faces in the crowd, petals on a
(2:14)?????. We seem to be floating , figuratively speaking, ..???? (utanje).... by
being free from time limits and space limits. It doesnt want to locate concretely ,
the image. That sense of sudden growth, which we experience in he presence of
greatest works of art. Thats what he wants to achieve, so that hoping that his art
might be seen in the future as one of the greatest works of art. So there is a hidden
self complimenting there. It is better to present one image in a lifetime, then to
produce voluminous work. So if you have done one short poem properly, than that
you have written a whole volume. But actually he did both. He had these succesful,
briliant short little poems like in a station of a metro, but then NETO (can those ?)
remain lifelong project, and the poor man died without having a sense that he had
finished. Never trust poets too much you know. Describing the genesis of his poem
in a station of the metro, Paul said the following: Three years ago in Paris I got
out of a metro train at La Concordia Place. And so suddenly a beautiful face, and
then an another , and another, and then a beautiful childs fist, and then another
beautiful woman, a crowrd in the city, getting out of a subway station. And I tried all
that day to find the words for what this had meant to me. And I couldnt find any
words that seemed to me worthy or as lovely as that sudden emotion. So here he
doesnt differ too much from Emerson, the transcendentalist who is his groping for
language which would adequately express the exhilaration that he felt at that
moment. But thats a very transitory moment. It goes away, what remains is a
memory, which he now tries to transpose into a language and never seeming to find
the fitting words. And that evening, as I went home along the (Neki dio Pariza) , I
was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found
words, but there came and equation, not in speech, but in little splashes of colour.
There you have the influence of painting. So they all experimented in their poetry
with the styles from music and painting. So he says, what came to him first in
connection with what he wanted to express were not words, any words, but just
some images and colours in his mind. It was just that, a pattern, or hardly a
pattern , if by pattern you mean something with a repeat in it, but it was a word, the
beginning , for me, of a language in colour. In this small poem you have how das the
language of colour speak. Contrast between the white goes like faces of these
human apparitions. So the whiteness and the blackness of the bow from which
they seem to be hanging. A China man said long ago, that if a man cant say what
he has to say in twelve lines, he better keep quiet. So that is the foundation of the
Haiku Japanese poems. So say everything you need or have or want to in no more
that twelve to sixteen lines of poetry, because if you cannot do this in this kind of
formal imitation, then dont even begin. So preciseness and precision were the
ideals of ancient Japanese Haiku poetry. And he took that over and tried to apply
this in the images phase while writing his poetry, but soon he would abandon
this. ??? And then he gives brilliant example of typical Japanese Haiku, which is so
beautiful poetry, in just one line. The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: the
butterfly. So he gives you a riddle, and then he unriddles . This Haiku poem. Znai,
otpali cvijet koji leti nazad ka svojoj grani, dvotaka, leptir. So poetically he
describes the butterfly . so they are playing with the sense of enigma , its a bit
puzzling and enigmatic. And thats, for him, the ideal, he wants this phase to
achieve just that. The one image poem. Poem which consists of a single image. The
one image poem is a form of superposition, one idea set on a top of another. I found
it useful in getting out of in pass, out of blind alley, which I have been left in by my
metro emotion. I wrote a thirty line poem, original form of this poem consisted of 30
lines, and destroyed it, because it was, what we called, work of a second intensity, it
was not immediate. Six months later I made a poem half that length , so from 30 he
cut it down to 15 lines, half year later. And a year later, I made a following, Haiku
like sentence. The apparition of these faces in the crowd. From 30 to 15, to 2. I
dare say it is meaningless , unless one had drifted into a certain vein of thought. So
he says, at first glance, the poem is completely meaningless, unless you simply
bring yourself into a similar mental state, and try to really envision that the way he
did. In the poem of this sort, he tries to record the precise instant, when a thing
outward and objective, out there in the world , transforms itself or darts into a thing
inward and subjective, which we have already seen in Andersons (neto). So he
shows modernist poetry and modernist literature in general, he practically gives
definition much wider than just his Haiku influenced poetry. Modernism is all about
translating things observed or perceived in, as he says, outworld reality, and how
they hit our consciousness, what they do to our mind, how they change us, what we
see, what we hear, what we feel, what we touch, and how this is then transformed
something which was objective, outside of me, comes through this magic of art,
poetry, and becomes something which is a part of me, which is inward, subjective.
And that is exactly what he did in this little poem with his experience on this metro
station. Outward objective thing, people rushing somewhere in the subway train
holing bough or the handle. He creates, or transforms this thing to deep subjective
experience, where he seems to be saying something about the very condition of our
culture. People who are ghost like. And its open to many interpretations, that
objectivity transforms to subjectivity, outwards into inwards. And before we turn to
actually reading the poem I just want to say that, we mention this collection
Ripostes from 1912., which was sort of turning point. Another influence I just
forgot to mention besides all these other things we said, especially this 1912.
Collection, Ripostes, we see, also his deep interest, at that time, for Kannada for
the old English poetry as well. Especially, he was one of the few back then who
recognized all this poetic quality of anglo saxon mitologies, like the seafarer and
wanderer (?!?!?). And in the Ripostes collection in 1912. he then wrote the same
named poem, entitled the seafarer, in which he deliberately invokes the past
again paradoxically. Trying to revise the past and go beyond it by invoking it. So he
writes the poem with the same title, where he deliberately somehow reveals that
the old anglo saxon seafarer is his model, and to an extent, imitates the
imagery, the language, the theme of carpe diem and trasitoriness that you have in
seafarer and the wanderer. So its a good illustration of his method, which is
also a modernist method. He also deliberately uses archaisms, archaic expressions
to invoke the atmosphere of anglo-saxon imagery, although it is a remake, a 20 th
century remake. And then, however, this second collection that we mention,
Lustra, or the poems of Lustra, 15 or in other editions 16 or 17. This collection of
Lustra belongs into the images phase, with which he began experimenting in 1912
-13-14-15 Generally corresponding with the 1st world war are the years in which
he experiments with images, with the reflection, and that is this collection, Lustra.
Maybe I didnt just emphasize it here. Who were some other imagers, ovdje ih
nabraja, ne mogu da pohvatam imena (oko 13:50). Some other interesting
illustrations of metro are in this collection, lustra, poems of Lustra, but also some
other interesting poems which are images, like Meditatio, which is on your syllabus.
Extremely short and very ironic, but in the same time highly artistic and
experimental, but also very satirical, where he again criticizes the age in which he
lives. And also thsai chih which is not on the syllabus, but it wouldnt hurt you to
read it, because anyway its so short and wouldnt take huge amounts of your time.
Tsai chi, I will just read ( i onda je proita). So you have the festival of colors and the
contrasting of colors, and always the petals falling somewhere or flying somewhere
back Japanese Haiku influence. Opet dio kad ne razumijem (na 15:15). His work
with the so called masks, or poetic personas or personae , is nothing else than his
kind of play with different poetic voices within the same neto (15:43). So he
already started to experiment with other things than imagism and in hugh selwyn
mauberley (hsm u daljem textu) , this is practically maybe the best example in
Pounds poetry of how he operates with these different poetic voices. Because,
generally speaking, the entire hsm is divided into two parts. And the criterion for
the division of that poem into two parts is that they revolve around two different
personas, around two different masks. The first part, which includes the
indroduction 1,2,3,4,5 etc, etc, that we are reading today , revolves around the
poetic voice or mask or persona of an unknown poet, whose initials, however, are
E.P. So it could be Ezra Pound, but doesnt have to be Ezra Pound. So, looking at the
first part of the entire poem, its title, overarching title, is misleading, because the
first part is not about HsM, modernistically, giving you false clues. So there is no
hsm whatsoever . If you are looking for him in the first part, you would be looking in
vain. So, persona of E.P. dominates, his voice dominates in the first part, throughout
these sections. And then the second part revolves around hsm, another poetic
voice. But, there are differences between these two poetic voices, but there are also
many corespondences and similarities. The most obvious one is that they are both
poets. And both of them are poets in the 20 th century, which is a tremendous
destiny, that might befall any poet (as we used to see??? 18:01). But this E.P.
whoever it was, is completely marginalized, and his significance is minimized, he is
not recognized, he or his poetry, or his art. He is bitter and disgusted with 20 th
century, and this first part is full of famous Pounds tirades against the ills of the
age. How vulgar it is, how cheap it is, how it doesnt know true culture, he also talks
about commercialization, consumer society, capitalism The greatest ill, he says, of
the western civilization is the usury, lihvarenje, and so on. There are also parts in
this sections, in the first part, where he also goes back to the bitter experience of
the 1st world war, and maybe the most bitter verses, and maybe the most bitter
verses of 1st world war in all of European modernist poetry are found in these
sections of hsm. So all in all he just sees the 20 th century as the age of tremendous
vulgarity. So the prevailing theme throughout hsm, the overarching theme is the
contrast between the sensitive, hypersensitive, sophisticated poet and the cheap
and vulgar, commercialized, consumer society like H. And this contrast, this gap,
cannot be closed. So throughout the sections of the first part he does variations on
the same themes on how terrible the world has become. And how sad an terrible,
sometimes tragicomic, the destiny of the artist in the cheap and vulgar 20 th
century , mechanical age, the age of mechanical, factory like reproduction, the
age that does not know or posses any true value or greatness and does not even
recognize greatness. The age that is obsessed with money and profit making, with
turning the art itself into a commodity on the market, which can be bought and sold.
Commodification of art pretvaranje umjetnosti u robu. So all the ills that we
unfortunately live with today, were recognized and detected and satirically depicted
by Ezra Pound. So thats the overarching contrast between him, and he constantly
says that he is out of time, or actually he is in the wrong time. So practically you
have two aspects of the same theme contrast between him, who is just physically
in the 20th century, but mentally and artistically he is off to better worlds, of his
poetry, of his art, of the past, of the Greek legends and mythology, whatever (lol).
And also, another aspect of this same theme practically is that constant contrasting
of the European, not only European, but mostly, cultures, that past. Cultural past,
great tradition. Including ancient Greek and Roman civilization but some other also.
The greatness of the antiquity which is, however, dead and gone forever. Its
philosophy, sculpting , music, poetry, science, everything. So he constantly
contrasts the greatness of the brilliant period in European history back then and this
vulgarity and cheapness of 20th century. He also works with fragments,
fragmentation is also there, he also operates with allusions, alludes to myriad of
texts from the past, literally and non literally. Everything we said about T. s Elliots
Wasteland, can be applied here as well, because the poem is fragmented, he
alludes, all the time, he crates network of allusions , to different works from the
past. Literally, philosophical texts, religious ., poems, music you will see, myriad
of references. And to an extent, although he didnt call it like t. s. Elliot, that way he
operates also with some sort of objective reality, because you have a lot of images,
or characters, or situations, which serve as symbols, extended symbols of either the
greatness of the past age, or the vulgarity of this age, as a sort of objective reality.
Hes also being very self-ironic. This voice, with his initials, E.P. Constantly
dramatizing and capitalizing, sort of, artistically, on his tragicomic position, who is
stuck there, in the midst of his age. And still tries to do something which is very
stubborn actually. He insists on keeping to write poetry. But however, everybody
else has turned towards more lucrative kind of ways of living their lives. But he is
stubborn in his devotion to the poetry of art. And that is why he is seen as a fool, as
a silly man. Because the 20th century doesnt know any poetry. And this is the
continued, but with a variation. In the second part, next week, of hsm, where we
have shift in poetic voice, a new mask, a new poetic persona, a new poetic voice,
that of hsm, as promised in the title. Hes another poet, another person who lives in
this harmony with his own age. He seems to be a little bit more successful than
maybe the E.P. But he is burdened by the same dilemmas as E.P. from the first part.
And especially the section called Mr.Nixon. Where he is given advice, hsm, how to
make it on the literary market. So what he has to do, he wants to advise him, if he
wants to become famous, because that world is all about getting famous. If your
poetry is not out on the market, its just like you have never written at all. But Mr.
Nixon himself sits in his green colored yard, and practically teaches the young
aspiring poet, hsm, to be an opportunist, to be opportunistic, to just no raise too
much troubles, and to not go against the grand, to run with the flow, to sell himself,
practically. Because only so would he be given access to important agents,
important reviewers, literary critics, who would then build him up into a literary
celebrity. So again, its a very sarcastic poem about what literature and art has
turned into, in the 20th century, how commoditized it had become. He inserts, he
pours, practically, into hsm, his entire cynicism and bitterness that he felt while he
was living in London from 1908 until that year when hsm was accomplished. So he
also depicts in a very sarcastic, ironic fashion sometimes, and humoristic
sometimes, fashion, London literary scene, the attitudes of the posing of many of
these kind of poets , and poets who would-be poets, and literary critics, and the
entire artistic world, and artistic snobs, and general cultural snobbery of the English
capital in this period. So, a lot of faking and a lot of snobbery as well, and he pours
all of that into hsm. He also looks back practically through E.P., but also through
hsm, through these two masks. Thats why they are called masks of Ezra Pound. Not
to be quite identified with the autor behind them, but he speaks through them
figuratively, as if he puts the mask of the one, and then the mask of another one. To
say something actually about how he saw London in that period. And looking back
onto that part of his own carrier summing up his twelve years , what he achieved,
what he didnt achieve, and maybe potentially the reasons why he didnt achieve
everything he wanted to. Because he himself was in this harmony with the age. Last
five poems, last five sections of the entire hsm are actually dominated by the
second mask, the one of hsm. And everything before that, from the beginning is the
first one, which is larger, comprises more sections, where E.P. speaks. So this is from
the poems of (???). When I carefully consider the curios habits of dogs.. Images
poem, from the imagist phase, what about this. Meditatio, from latin, means
razmiljanje (that sweet voice), refleksija. So see how he manages, brilliantly with
such a short poem, to express his cynical view of the mankind, of humanity in
general. So what is he saying? 30:35